openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2020/07

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

At SUSE we had so-called hackweek. Meaning everybody could do something out of their regular tasks and work for a week on something else they wish to invest time on. I used the time to finally get the ‘osc collab’ server back in shape (Migrated from SLE11SP4 to Leap 15.1) – And in turn handed ‘The Tumbleweed Release Manager hat’ over to Oliver Kurz, who expressed an interest in learning about the release Process for Tumbleweed. I think it was an interesting experiment for both of us: for him, to get something different done and for me to get some interesting questions as to why things are the way they are. Obviously, a fresh look from the outside gives some interesting questions and a few things translated in code changes on the tools in use (nothing major, but I’m sure discussions will go on)

As I stepped mostly back this week and handed RM tasks over to Oliver, that also means he will be posting the ‘Review of the week’ to the opensuse­factory mailing list. For my fellow blog users, I will include it here directly for your reference.

What was happening this week and included in the published snapshots:

* KDE Applications 19.12.2
* KDE Plasma 5.18
* Linux Kernel 5.5.1 (which as some times in before posed a problem for owners 
of NVIDIA cards running proprietary drivers when Tumbleweed is too fast and 
drivers are not yet provided by NVIDIA in time for the new kernel version)²

What is still ongoing or in the process in stagings:

* Python 3.8 (salt, still brewing but progressing)
* Removal of python 2 (in multiple packages)
* glibc 2.31 (good progress but not done)
* GNU make 4.3
* libcap 2.30: breaks fakeroot and drpm
* RPM: change of the database format to ndb
* MicroOS Desktop³

Have fun,
Oliver