Review of the week 2017/28 & 29

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

What a luck I did not get around to write the review last week – I’d have a hard time this week otherwise. As you certainly realized, we did not have a snapshot for a long time already (in fact 0712 is currently the last release). Since the last review of two weeks ago, there have been 5 snapshots released (0707, 0708, 0709, 0710 and 0712) Let’s focus on what those snapshots delivered, then I’ll try to give some information of why we stalled for 10 days now.

• Qt 5.9.1
• libzypp: dup defaults now to –allow-no-vendor-change
• wine 2.12
• Mesa 17.1.4
• NetworkManager 1.8.2
• All the nice things the YaST Team is blogging about

with snapshot 0712 I was approached by SUSE internally for a small ‘break’, as SLE15 did not keep up with building on the linked infrastructure (mainly due to archs building slower than x86_64 does, like aarch64 and s390x). So I basically granted them the weekend until July 17, by when the internal infrastructure was indeed ready and we wanted to resume Tumbleweed snapshots. Of course, we had been working a lot on the Staging areas and were ready for quite some massive changes on Monday (for the 0717 snapshot)

Among the interesting things there were:

• Linux kernel 4.12
• ruby 2.4 as default, with ruby 2.2 and ruby 2.3 being removed from the repositories

Turns out, one of our bots had a mistake and the removal of ruby 2.2 would have disrupted our users: the bot did not flag the removal of ruby 2.2 in the product and as a consequence, ruby 2.4 moving to be default would have conflicted with the old ruby 2.2 package. Nothing we wanted to see shipped to our users. Once the bot was fixed, we had a new snapshot coming up, 0719. The issues seen with the ruby migration were all gone, but now kernel 4.12 started to show its face: an installation running on a RAID10 setup simply started locking up. Of course, the kernel team is looking into that and as soon as a patch is ready, we will be able to ship 4.12. Until then, and to unblock Tumbleweed, we reverted back to kernel 4.11.8 (the one shipped in 0712 already). This is currently building – but I’m not yet daring to make a statement if this will be released or not. Time (and openQA) will tell.

In any case, staging work is still moving along in parallel too, and we are also preparing these updates:

• Mozilla Firefox 52.2.1esr
• KDE Applications 17.04.3
• Libreoffice5.4.02, with google online capabilities, enabled
• Linux kernel 4.12.x, that won’t crash RAID10 setups

If you have updates you want to see in Tumbleweed (or new packages) don’t be shy, speak up and help out with the packaging work.