openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2021/21

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

During this week, we have finalized the UsrMerge project in openSUSE:Factory. Future snapshots will have /bin as a symlink to /usr/bin, and /lib(64) as symlink to /usr/lib(64). This is also the reason why the last snapshot tested and published was 0424. After that, I was keeping OBS busy with a full bootstrap and rebuild of Tumbleweed. But let’s first focus on the things that have been delivered during the last week, namely the 4 snapshots 0520, 0521, 0522, and 0524.

Those snapshots contained:

• Mozilla Thunderbird 78.10.2
• NetworkManager-applet 1.22.0 (last week I wrongly announced an upgrade of NetworkManager, but in fact it was NetworkManager-applet)
• Linux kernel 5.12.4
• Poppler 21.05.0
• sssd 2.5.0: note, a few deprecated command-line arguments have been removed for good
• zstd 1.5.0
• Mesa 21.1.1

The next snapshot to be published, possibly 0525 in case openQA agrees, will be built entirely using gcc11 and will have UsrMerge enabled. You can find some information about this topic at https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Usr_merge

Besides that, the snapshots in planning, beyond that point, are planned to bring:

• python3x packages will no longer provide python symbol. This caused for some confusion in the past when people expected ‘python’ to be the legacy python2, but python3x provided it as well.
• Linux kernel 5.12.6
• systemd-experimental should finally land in the repositories
• KDE Plasma 5.22.0: for now we still have 5.22 Beta in staging, release is planned for week 23