openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2022/02

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

The holidays are over and people are returning to their computers, submitting a lot more than during the last weeks. Out of the 6 snapshots built and tested,5 made it out to the mirrors (0107, 0109, 0110, 0111, and 0112).

The most interesting updates in those snapshots are:

  • Linux kernel 5.16.0
  • GNOME 41.3
  • openSSL 1.1.1m
  • python36-FOO modulea re no longer built; The repo still contains ~ 200 python36 packages, but those are mainly due to build failures in python-singlespec packages. You can expect them to vanish over the next few days
  • fmt 8.1.1: Restores ABI compatibiliy to fmt 8.0
  • fwupd-efi: Re-add fwupdx64.efi.signed symlink (boo#1192206)
  • KDE Frameworks 5.90.0
  • KDE Plasma 5.23.5
  • KDE Gear 21.12.1
  • Mozilla Firefox 96.0
  • Wayland 1.20.0

The first wave of submissions could be worked off and stagings are looking not that crowded at the moment. The things on the horizon I’m currently aware of are:

  • linux-glibc-devel 5.16: syncing up with the kernel
  • Ruby 3.1 to be introduced and become the main ruby interpreter. Ruby 2.7 and Ruby 3.0 will disappear at the same time.
  • Python 3.6 interpreter will be removed (once all python36-FOO modules are gone)
  • Python 3.10 as the distro default interpreter (a bit down the line)
  • GCC 12 introduction has started to be as ready as possible for when the upstream release happens.

Most of those items will be some longer-lasting efforts. The list is ordered based on my prediction of how they will land in Tumbleweed.