Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
This weekly review mostly benefits from last weeks late release of snapshot 0314 and the snapshots done over the weekend, so I can still report ‘4 snapshots published this week’. The snapshots covered are 0314, 0316, 0318 and 0319.
These 4 snapshots included those updates:
- GNOME 3.28.0
- New branding (bootsplash/wallpaper)
- GDB 8.1
- Linux kernel 4.15.9 & 4.15.10
- Systemd 237
I would like to give special attention to the next snapshot that is going to be published. It’s called ‘20180320’, but was in the makings much longer than is usual for our snapshots. This is due to the switch of the ‘product builder’, the code responsible for creating the media layout (note: the download repos are also ‘media’). A major change is that the repos are no longer so-called ‘susetags repos’ (by zypper identified as ‘YaST2 type’), but are all standard rpm-md repositories. Zypper will transparently change the mode of the repo from yast2 to rpm-md for you, so there is no action needed and a normal ‘zypper dup’ is supposed to work (and did in all our QA test runs).
Besides this major architectural change, Snapshot 0320 will bring you of course also nice updates, to make the wait worthwhile:
- Mozilla Firefox 59.0
- KDE Applications 17.12.3
- KDE Frameworks 5.44.0
- postfix 3.3.0
- PostgreSQL 10.3
Beyond that, in the future you can expect these changes to come your way:
- Mesa 18.0.0rc5 (final RC, it’s believed to go gold as-is)
- Samba 4.8
- JDK 10
- Linux kernel 4.15.11
- GCC8 as system compiler (not too soon, Staging work has just started and there will be issues to be ironed out first)