Review of the week 2018/03

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

A steady flow of snapshots is reaching the Tumbleweed users: this week, another 4 snapshots have been released onto the users, some with a bit more bandwidth demand, some with issues that were not anticipated by the test suite (but easily resolved by the user, and fixes underway)

The week saw releases of the snapshot 0110, 0114, 0116 and 0117, with those changes:

• mpfr 4.0: as announced last week, we needed an almost complete rebuild of the distro, as this is deeply nested. This resulted in snapshot 0110 being larger than average.
• Squid 4.0.22 (upgraded from 3.5.27)
• RPM 4.14. Caution for packagers: rpm is less forgiving on errors in spec files
• Bind 9.11.2
• Mesa 17.3.2: in order to improve the distro build performance, Meas was split into two parts to be built. Users that updated their system using “–no-recommends” did not get Mesa-dri auto-installed, resulting in the graphical system possibly not starting up. Simply install Mesa-dri for now manually (dependency chain fixes are underway)
• Linux kernel 4.14.13
• librsvg 2.42.0: rewritten in Rust
• OpenSSH 7.6p1
• KDE Applications 17.12.1
• Default firewall module picked for new installs is now firewalld
• Last, but not least: libstorage-ng has arrived

But, Tumbleweed would not be rolling if no further things would be in the works already. The larger topics are:

• Glibc will completely drop sunrpc support (we have tirpc available, with ipv6 support)
• Linux kernel 4.14.14
• Change of default Ruby version from 2.4 to 2.5
• KDE Frameworks 5.42.0
• KDE Plasma 5.12.0

The list of work in progress feels quite short compared to what has been achieved last week, but keep in mind that some things have been in the works for quite a while, it was just coincidence that so many things turned out ready at the same time.