openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the weeks 2019/04 – 07

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

From the title of this post, it becomes apparent that I have to change something in my weekly planning – like better allocate time to writing the weekly reviews, and maybe stop taking a vacation 🙂

So I started looking into the releases of the last 4 weeks and was shocked to only find 8 snapshots (0121, 0124, 0125, 0126, 0201, 0202, 0205 and 0209). This is not how it used to be – but then, the last couple days/weeks also had some major updates that disrupted the flow a bit – Updates, we have all been eagerly awaiting, such as:

• KDE Applications 18.12.1
• KDE Frameworks 5.54.0
• Linux kernel 4.20.2, 4.20.4 & 4.20.6
• LibreOffice 6.2
• Wine 4.0 & 4.1
• Python 3.7
• Bash 5.0
• Readline 8.0
• Mesa 18.3.2
• glibc 2.29
• Ruby 2.6
• sysconfig 0.85.x

Unfortunately, not all of those updates (looking at you, sysconfig) have been as painless to the users as they should have been – I’d like to apologize at this point for the trouble caused. Any such issue is taken as input into our testing infrastructure, in an attempt to better catch such issues before users struggle with them.

Despite all those major achievements, a lot of new updates / changes are already being forged:

• KDE Applications 18.12.2 & KDE Frameworks 5.55.0 (both to come in snapshot 0214+)
• Mozilla Firefox 65.0
• Flatpak 1.2.0
• Linux kernel 4.20.7 and beyond
• Removal of Ruby 2.5 from the distribution
• Filesystem blacklisting: The kernel won’t autoload all filesystem modules anymore. The modules stay available, but won’t be autoloaded
• Binutils 2.32