openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the Week 2017/02

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

I hope you all ended up well fed and healthy in the new year. For the last few weeks we have seen quite a slow pace for Tumbleweed, just as pre-announced in my last review of the year 2016. We can surely expect an increased pace again as people from all around the world resume their regular life rhythms. For completeness sake I will cover in this weeks’ review not only this week, but also the few snapshots since my last review. That means, we cover 8 snapshots: from 2016: 1216, 1217, 1219, 1222 and 1226 and from 2017: 0104, 0109 and 0110. Sadly, 0111 and 0112 ran into some issues on openQA – but the issues are to most parts in the testing framework, not the product (from what we know). But not being able to fully confirm it, I did not feel comfortable releasing them into the wild onto you. After all, I know some of you are still having issues with the kernel 4.9 series (but good new on that part is on the horizon). 0112 might still cut it, if we solve the openQA issues in time.

So, let’s see what those snapshots brought you:

• Some preparations for system 232 to be able to land
• Pidgin found new maintainers finally – so we have people actually caring for it again
• KDE Applications 16.12.0
• KDE Frameworks 5.29.0
• Qt 5.7.1
• Plasma 5.8.5
• Linux Kernel 4.9.0

As mentioned earlier, Linux Kernel 4.9.0 caused reboot failures for a couple of users. Theses issues have since been analyzed and, for people following the bug report, a test kernel made available for those users. The feedback so far looks very promising and we can surely expect a final fix for this rather soon.

There is also quite some things piled up already, full prepared or almost ready to be shipped:

• X.org server 1.19.0 – will be in snapshot 0112+
• Systemd 232 – all problems seem resolved, you can expect it shortly
• Linux Kernel 4.9.3
• Flatpak 0.8 – Upstream says this is the version Software Vendors should target
• gstreamer 0.10 is scheduled for removal from Tumbleweed

With so many nice updates prepared, Tumbleweed promises to keep on rolling into a bright Year 2017.