Review of the weeks 2018/17 & 18

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Again a review spanning two weeks – but a lot of resources are currently focusing on making openSUS Leap 15.0 rock solid, which means some packages are just trying to fix known bugs instead of updating to new versions that might fix the known bugs but most likely also introduced new ones. Not that openSUSE Tumbleweed strict as to adhere to the upgrade cadence of Leap. but as maintainers share the burden of both products, it’s natural that many will try to keep the difference small for the time being. The past two weeks have seen 8 openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots: 0419, 0420, 0424, 0425, 0427, 0429, 0501 and 0502.

The snapshots contained those noteworthy updates:

• KDE Frameworks 5.45.0
• GNOME 3.28.1
• Mesa 18.0.1
• Linux Kernels 4.16.3 through4.16.6
• KDE Applications 18.04.0
• LibreOffice 6.0.4.1
• polkit 0.114 – based on Mozilla js engine 52 (previous 17)

The staging projects currently contain these larger changes, some of which might need some help (check out the dashboard):

• GCC 8 as distro default compiler (incl. update to GCC 8.1)
• ICU 61.1 – nodejs and LibreOffice need build fixes.
• TeXLive 2018 final 20180414
• Automake 1.16[.1] – As we migrate from 1.15, builds that implciitly call automake will fail; change your build to explicitly call autoreconf (staging almost ready, only libtool left)
• FFmpeg 4 (with ffmpeg 3.x staying available for now in the distro)
• Freetype 2.9.1: freetype-config is no longer shipped. configure scripts relying on it should be rewritten to use pkg-config to find the relevant information
• Plasma 5.12.5
• Linux kernel 4.16.7