Review of the week 2018/06

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Finally back to getting the weekly review done on Friday. Week 6 is coming to an end and Tumbleweed delivered 5 snapshots in this time (0202, 0203, 0205, 0206 and 0207). Sone issues did slip past our QA system and sadly some users were hit by issues. More about that further down.

The five snapshots delivered those updates:

• Many yast fixes/changes, as detailed in the yast sprint review
• Mesa 18.0.0 – responsible for the issues mentioned initially
• NetworkManager 1.10.2
• ncurses 6.1
• LibreOffice 6.0.0.3 (RC3)
• sqlite3.22.0
• KDE Plasma 5.12.0
• Linux kernel 4.15.1
• Mozilla Firefox 58.0.1

And those things are in the makings:

• Linux Kernel 4.15.2
• GLIBC 2.27, with deprecation of sunrpc
• Freetype 2.9
• VLC 3.0.0

Now some words about the issues of the last week: Mesa 18 (rc) was delivered to the users in snapshot 0203. After a few reports, it became apparent that Mesa is writing invalid cache data on the disk, which after being read, causes issues like white screens and such. The number of boots varied and openQA did not catch this – even though we do have reboots in the system tests too, this was not sufficient to trigger the failures. As soon as the problem was identified, a fix was prepared and published in the update channel and finally in the 0206 snapshot. Unfortunately, at that point, the saved disk cache was already invalid and users were forced to clean it out manually (remove ~/.cache of the user and also /var/lib/sddm/.cache)

At this point I’d like to thank all the users reporting the issue, the developers working on fixing the issue and the entire community to help each other out to find the right solutions for the problems found