Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2026/28

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This past week brought a few heart-stopping moments for both our users and the release engineering team!

For our users, the massive size of snapshot 0703 likely came as a surprise. However, the sheer size didn’t actually reflect a massive number of source changes. Instead, it was the result of reconfiguring Tumbleweed to stop building Python 3.11 modules. This shift required us to hand control of the rebuild strategy over to OBS (similar to how we handle full rebuilds for new compilers) and rely on build-compare to filter out unchanged packages.

For the release engineers, the Python change was straightforward. What actually tripped us up was an unfortunate combination of submissions in snapshot 0706, which ultimately had to be discarded. (As a quick aside: snapshots 0704 and 0705 were never built, as that was the weekend the full rebuild without python-3.11 was in progress.) We thought we had pinpointed the issue and reverted the suspected package, only to discover we had only solved half the puzzle.

The real culprits were selinux-policy—which initially looked like the perfect suspect after openQA failed dozens of SELinux tests—combined with an rpm packaging change that split its plugins into optional subpackages. Specifically, the plugin responsible for SELinux labeling became so optional that it was no longer installed by default. In retrospect, it was an easy bug to squash once we understood the root cause. For the technically curious: we simply added Requires: (rpm-plugin-selinux if selinux-policy) to the rpm package. This finally cleared our openQA tests, though it did force us to discard a few snapshots along the way.

Despite the turbulence, we successfully published 4 snapshots (0702, 0703, 0707, and 0708) this past week, delivering the following updates:

• Removal of python311-* module packages: We are still shipping the Python 3.11 interpreter alongside base modules like pip and setuptools. This ensures you can still use pip/venv to install any necessary modules, though they will now be managed outside the control of openSUSE and zypper.
• KDE Gear 26.04.3
• KDE Plasma 6.7.2
• SDL 3.4.12
• fwupd 2.1.6
• Linux kernel 7.1.2 & 7.1.3
• setools 4.7.0
• systemd 260.3
• Mesa 26.1.4
• GNOME Shell & Mutter 50.3
• Mozilla Firefox 152.0.4
• gpg 2.5.21 & gpgme 2.1.2

Let’s take a look at what we can expect in the coming days and weeks.

For starters, we will definitely be putting selinux-policy back into the queue after leaving it reverted for the time being. This will provide the final proof of whether the issue was indeed that tricky combination of submissions, or if rpm was acting up all by itself.

Peeking at the staging projects, integration tests are currently underway for several notable updates:

• GStreamer 1.28.5
• SELinux toolchain 3.11, together with selinux-policy
• linux-glibc-devel 7.1: fix for llvm versions needed; llvm21 in ring as mandatory before we can move on
• Qemu 11.0.0: 32-bit host support has been dropped. kiwi itself was fixed to no longer depend on the obsolete tools, but the current submission of kiwi introduced a regression, switching Grub2 on our built images from graphical to text mode
• Podman 6.0.0
• GCC 16 as the default system compiler