openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2020/13

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

During this week, we have released 6 snapshots to the public (0318, 0319, 0320, 0322, 0324, 0325). The changes were more under the hood than spectacular, but here they are:

• RPM: change of database format to ndb (Read on – there were some issues)
• Mozilla Firefox 74.0
• Linux kernel 5.5.9 & 5.5.11
• VirtualBox 6.1.4
• KDE Frameworks 5.68.0
• Mesa 20.0.2
• Coreutils 8.32
• Samba 4.12.0

This was week 13. Are you superstitious? Any special fear of ’13’? We could, of course, blame week 13 for the minor issue we had not caught with openQA, but I’d rather claim it would have happened any week. We simply lack an upgrade test for MicroOS. What am I talking about? You most likely have not even realized there was an issue. The RPM switch of the database format to ndb (any other DB format would have exposed the same issue, so no flaming here) had a glitch on MicroOS and transactional-update based installations in that the RPM database was not accessible for a moment. Nothing broke (unless you rolled back after seeing it – this might have been more problematic). See Bug 1167537 if you’re interested in more details. Of course, fixed RPM packages are already out (we even published it asap in the :Update channel) – and the affected systems could self heal.

Staging projects are still busy with changes around these topics:

• Kubernetes 1.18.0
• Linux kernel 5.5.13
• Rust 1.41.1
• LLVM 10
• Qt 5.15.0 (currently beta2 being tested)
• Ruby 2.7 – possibly paired with the removal of Ruby 2.6
• GCC 10 as the default compiler
• Removal of Python 2
• GNU Make 4.3