openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2022/01

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

First off, welcome to twenty-twenty-two, the year of the Linux desktop (wasn’t it?). The year is kicking off strong with openSUSE Tumbleweed – but not with daily snapshots: openQA did not agree with some of the changes (i.e one snapshot caused all non-x86_64 architectures to fail to boot, one snapshot had a broken virtualization stack, and of course, none of that made it to you, our users). Despite all that, we published 4 snapshots during this week: 20220101, 0102, 0103, and 0106.

The major changes include:

• Mozilla Firefox 95.0.2
• Linux kernel 5.15.12
• GTK 4.6.0
• Python 3.10 has been added to the list of python versions to build python<X>-modules.
• fmt 8.1.0

Things being worked on, that should reach Tumbleweed rather sooner than later:

• Python 3.6 modules will no longer be built (snapshot 0107+). We now build modules for python 3.8, 3.9 and 3.10. For now, python 3.8 is still the distro default python interpreter
• openssl 1.1.1m
• meson 0.60.3: since meson 0.59, the build system became much stricter. Meson now fails if invalid paramters are passed to it (most of the issues found were typos that were silently ignored, or config parameters that no longer eixtsed and thus had no effect anyway)
• KDE Plasma 5.23.5
• KDE Gear 21.12.1
• Switch to Ruby 3.1: all tests passed, only apparmor fails to build
• Python 3.10 to be promoted to the distro default interpreter (tests to start soon)
• PHP 8 as the default php flavor
• zstd 1.5.1: this was responsible in an earlier snapshot for the non-x86_64 boot failures; issue should be fixed, rebuild in progress