Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
As I did not publish an update last week, we have to span two weeks
now. A lot has happened, many of those things are already shipped to
you or are going to happen shortly. This review will touch the
snapshots 0112, 0117, 0118, 0120, 0121, 0123, 0124 and 0125. A total of
8 snapshots.
What did those snapshots contain:
* A dbus update that caused some grief. I’ll explain further down
* Pulseaudio 10.0
* Flatpak 0.8
* Linux kernel 4.9.5
* X.Org server 1.19.1
* KDE Applications 16.12.1
* qemu 2.7
* llvm 3.9
* Wine 2.0
So, what was the issue with the dbus update and what caused it: while
updating the dbus-1 package, the system reset the X-server and the
running session ‘crashed’ away. The reason can easily be marked as a
packaging bug: whenever a package containing a service is being
updated, the services are automatically restarted. For most things this
is the appropriate action. For dbus (and a few other such low-level
services) this does cause issues in the type we have noticed them in
the last weeks. There are multiple ways to influence this behavior: the
user/admin can change the default behavior for his machine in
/etc/sysconfig/services and the packager can mark his own service as
not restart-able during package update. The 2nd piece was unfortunately
missing, causing the trouble. A fixed version is in the makings and
will be delivered soon.
What else is being forged:
* systemd 232 – we had this on the list for a long time. It’s getting
closer
* Newer Linux Kernel – 4.9.6 and beyond
* Libreoffice 5.3 – just some ppc64le issues to be sorted
* KDE Frameworks 5.30 together with Plasma 5.9
* GStreamer 0.10 removal scheduled for Friday, 03 February 2017
The GStreamer 0.10 removal has been long announced and with the
exception of a few stale packages, everybody worked at their best to
remove this old, insecure, no-longer maintained code-base. Together
with it, also wxWidgets 2.8 will be dropped. wxWidgets 3.0 has been in
Tumbleweed for a long time already.
Cheers,
Dominique