Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week, we had once again openQA blocking the release of one snapshot and protecting some of our users (using the experimental sdboot/disk-encryption). openQA has identified an inconsistency in snapshot 0215 and found that systems with this update would fail to unlock their disks. The fix landed in snapshot 0216. openQA confirmed the fix and the five snapshots 0216, 0218, 0220, 0221, and 0222 have been published.

The most relevant changes in those releases were:

  • Mozilla Firefox 122.0.1
  • bind 9.18.24
  • dav1d 1.4.0
  • PHP 8.2.16
  • Poppler 24.02.0
  • Shadow 4.14.5
  • Mesa 23.3.6
  • Meson 1.3.2
  • binutils 2.42
  • GCC 14 is now the libgcc provider. GCC 13 is still the default compiler being used
  • Linux kernel 6.7.5
  • pkgconf 2.1.1
  • Node.JS 21.6.2
  • Qt 6.6.2
  • Systemd 254.9
  • perl-Bootloader 1.12: no longer written in perl (package name change to happen later)
  • Qemu 8.2.1
  • Lots of packages preparing for RPM 4.20 (%patchN no longer supported) (~ 600 out of 2000 packages fixed this week)
  • RPM: enable reproducible builds by default (bsc#1148824)

In my opinion, that’s quite an impressive list. Soon (and a bit more distant) we will be shipping these changes:

  • Ruby 3.2 deprecation: ruby3.2 all ruby3.2-rubygem packages will be removed from Tumbleweed
  • python 3.9 deprecation: all python39-* packages are scheduled for removal. We still have Python 3.10, Python 3.11 (the default interpreter), and Python 3.12 in Tumbleweed. Unfortunately, this road will be bumpy, as many Python packages still do not build for Python 3.12 – and unless the builds succeed, the pytho39-XXX packages will stay lingering in the repository.
  • Systemd 255
  • Many more package fixes to prepare for RPM 4.20
  • KDE Frameworks and Plasma 6
  • dbus-broker: a big step forward; upgrades seem to be an issue that needs to be addressed
  • libxml 2.12.x: slow progress
  • GCC 14: phase 2: use gcc14 as default compiler