openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2021/22

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week was definitively amongst the more interesting ones for Tumbleweed. There was a change of the basic filesystem layout called UsrMerge. Unfortunately, despite all planning and testing, some users still ran into issues. In some cases, it could be pointed to an ‘unexpected’ setup (root on zfs, /usr/lib/debug as sep mount point…) and in some cases, the reason for the failure is not yet fully understood. But this might sound scarier than it is: a lot of users have also reported that the process worked flawlessly on their systems. Together with a full rebuild using GCC 11 snapshot 0527 was definitively huge. Besides that, two more snapshots (0601, and 0602) were published.

The major changes in this week are:

• UsrMerge enabled (https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Usr_merge – see also the section ‘Known issues’)
• Distribution rebuilt using gcc 11.1
• bind 9.16.16
• ghostscript 9.54.0
• elfutils 0.185

After having slowed down Tumbleweed a bit to settle the UsrMerge dust, we could catch up with the stagings projects and have not that many things left in the queue. But that is just today and things can change quickly there. The current plans for future snapshots include:

• Linux kernel 5.12.9
• systemd-experimental (pstore, repart, homed, userdb)
• Mesa 21.1.2
• libxml 2.9.12: http://xmlsoft.org/news.html
• Cinnamon 5.0
• curl 7.77.0
• systemd 248
• KDE Plasma 5.22.0
• python3x packages will no longer provide a python symbol. This caused some confusion in the past when people expected ‘python’ to be the legacy python2, but python3x provided it as well.