Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Uh-oh – that was a slow weel in Tumbleweed. Only a single snapshot (0825) has been sent out to the mirrors. Some more had been built and discarded.

The reasons were pretty simple: with the introduction of the package dnf, that uses some of the new rpm boolean dependency operators (new since rpm 4.13), we ended up having metadata n the repository that is well understood by Tumbleweed systems, but not by any system one might want to upgrade to Tumbleweed (Think Leap 42.x). The final solution will be to finish the migration to the new product-builder, and thus using pure rpm-md repositories, but that is still a few days/weeks away. In the meantime, we disabled those boolean dependencies in DNF (as an acceptable workaround). Of course, it took me two snapshots to get this right – and then openQA bailed on us: the disk is showing major corruptions and the database throws errors. The heroes are currently looking into this issue – and once ready, we should be able to resume normal operations (all previous snapshots will be merged into one larger update)

Snapshot 0825 already was quite big too, as it updated those components:

  • Mozilla Thunderbird 52.3.0
  • KDE Applications 17.08.0
  • KDE Frameworks 5.37.0
  • KDE Plasma 5.10.5
  • cURL 7.55
  • gcc 7.2 rc
  • glibc 2.26

As openQA is currently down, that unfortunately also means the Factory staging dashboard is unavailable, which makes me have to tell the ‘what is coming up section’ from memory. Certainly, I’ll miss a few things, but I remember:

  • gpg 2.2
  • Linux kernel 4.12.9 (in the next snapshot to be released) and 4.12.10 in planning
  • PHP5 is scheduled for removal from Tumbleweed – Move your setups already now to PHP7

I’m sure there are more things happening – some of them probably also longer lasting (like OpenSSL 1.1 as default migration), but as said, with openQA and the dashboard being unavailable, the above are the things I recall from memory.

I’m sure the issues will be resolved soon – and Tumbleweed will start to have even more frequent releases again.