openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the Week 2017/03 & 04

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

As I did not publish an update last week, we have to span two weeks now. A lot has happened, many of those things are already shipped to you or are going to happen shortly. This review will touch the snapshots 0112, 0117, 0118, 0120, 0121, 0123, 0124 and 0125. A total of 8 snapshots.

What did those snapshots contain:

• A dbus update that caused some grief. I’ll explain further down
• Pulseaudio 10.0
• Flatpak 0.8
• Linux kernel 4.9.5
• X.Org server 1.19.1
• KDE Applications 16.12.1
• qemu 2.7
• llvm 3.9
• Wine 2.0

So, what was the issue with the dbus update and what caused it: while updating the dbus-1 package, the system reset the X-server and the running session ‘crashed’ away. The reason can easily be marked as a packaging bug: whenever a package containing a service is being updated, the services are automatically restarted. For most things this is the appropriate action. For dbus (and a few other such low-level services) this does cause issues in the type we have noticed them in the last weeks. There are multiple ways to influence this behavior: the user/admin can change the default behavior for his machine in /etc/sysconfig/services and the packager can mark his own service as not restart-able during package update. The 2nd piece was unfortunately missing, causing the trouble. A fixed version is in the makings and will be delivered soon.

What else is being forged:

• systemd 232 – we had this on the list for a long time. It’s getting closer
• Newer Linux Kernel – 4.9.6 and beyond
• Libreoffice 5.3 – just some ppc64le issues to be sorted
• KDE Frameworks 5.30 together with Plasma 5.9
• GStreamer 0.10 removal scheduled for Friday, 03 February 2017

The GStreamer 0.10 removal has been long announced and with the exception of a few stale packages, everybody worked at their best to remove this old, insecure, no-longer maintained code-base. Together with it, also wxWidgets 2.8 will be dropped. wxWidgets 3.0 has been in Tumbleweed for a long time already.