openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2024/13

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

What a week! We all were looking forward to a short week just before the Easter weekend and a long break. Things just never are, as they are expected to be, right? You have “only” received 4 snapshots this week (0325, 0326, 0327, and 0328) – and, as happens very rarely, some updates in the update channel (this should indicate to you it is important enough for us to side-track the already fast release process).

The most relevant changes this week were:

• Mesa 24.0.3
• KDE Gear 24.02.1
• emacs 29.3
• Shadow 4.15.1
• Mozilla Firefox 124.0.1
• KDE Plasma 6.0.3
• LibreOffice 24.2.2
• TeXLive 2024
• Qt 6.6.3
• cURL 8.7.1
• xz 5.6.1.revertto5.4 (version 5.4, but with a version tag > 5.6.1 for users that wrongly would not use zypper dup – we wanted to be sure). Please see https://news.opensuse.org/2024/03/29/xz-backdoor/ and upgrade SOON (at least liblzma5, then reboot)

For some regions, there is a long weekend ahead – so expect no / few snapshots until early next week. For snapshot 0328, Ring0 has been completely bootstrapped (as the attack vectors for xz were not fully known, we went the safest route) and for 0329 all of Tumbleweed rebuilt against that new base; Ezpect that snapshot to appear ‘large’ (even though many packages will not be different). The relevant changes to come to you during the next days/week include:

• Python 3.9 module removal (the bootstrap rebuild was a good excuse, as that removal would have required OBS internal rebuild strategy anyway – so instead of doing it twice, we pulled that change forward into 0329 – I mentioned that removed for a few weeks already)
• Linux kernel 6.8.2
• Linux LTS Kernel 6.6.23
• dbus-broker: no progress this week
• libxml 2.12.x: slow/no progress
• GCC 14: phase 2: use gcc14 as the default compiler