openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2020/52

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Xmas is upon us – at least in some areas of the world. This means quitea lot of people are away from their computers and the number of submissions is getting a bit lower. Tumbleweed is not stopping though – it just rolls at the pace contributors create submissions. For week 2020/52 this means a total of 3 snapshots that were published. Saddest of this all is that the new kernel 5.10 is not behaving very nicely when the iwlwifi module is being loaded. The three snapshots published were 1218, 1221 and 1223, containing those changes:

• KDE Applications 20.12.0
• Poppler 20.12.1
• Linux kernel 5.10.1: as noted in the intro, there is an issue with iwlwifi. Unfortunately i was informed about that too late. The earlier reported amdgpu issue had been fixed in time though. Upstream bug reference: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=210733
• Systemd 246.9

The staging projects are still filled up and a few more snapshots are likely to be released this year. Some of the changes that might become ready include:

• Mozilla Firefox 84.0
• icu 68.1: breaks a few things like postgresql. Staging:I
• Ruby 3.0: final release is staged. It will be added short term as additional version, with the default, used by r.g YaST, pinned to version 2.7
• Multiple python 3 versions parallel installable. Adding to python 3.8, version 3.6 week be reintroduced. Python modules will be built for both versions.
• RPM 4.16: all build issues in Staging:A have been fixed, but on upgrades, rpm seems to segfault in some cases.
• brp-check-suse: a bug fix in how it detected dangling symlinks (it detected them, but did not fail as it was supposed to)
• permissions package: prepares for easier listing, while supporting a full /usr merge
• Rpmlint 2.0: experiments ongoing in Staging:M
• openssl 3: not much progress, Staging:O still showing a lot of errors.