Dear Tumbleweed hackers and packagers,

After a lengthy staging period, RPM 4.19 is shaping up and all issues noticed in the rings (packages guaranteed to build/be installable) have been addressed or have fixes pending.

As you are all aware, the rings cover only about 20% of the packages in Factory.

The release notes for RPM 4.19 are at https://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.19.0

Out of the RPM release notes (https://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.19.0) the two most noteworthy bullets are:

  * Any non-root ownership in the %files section (through %attr() or %defattr()) now generates an automatic dependency on the named user and/or group. This dependency can be satisfied by another package shipping a sysusers.d(5) file or the /etc/passwd and /etc/group files themselves. Existing packages shipping any of these files will have to be rebuilt with RPM 4.19 in order for them to carry the respective user and/or group provides. This may require distro-level coordination to ensure proper installation of all the affected packages. For more information, please consult the manual.

  *  %patch without arguments (previously an alias to %patch 0) is now a build error (use %patch N instead)

The %patch one is rather simple and results in a build failure; monitoring your devel packages should give you hints very soon if your package is impacted. We created submit requests for most, if not all, packages affected by that in the last months.

The story around the users can be trickier to be identified, as the build might succeed, but the package not being installable at the end due to missing dependencies reported. This usually happens when users are generated in %pre scripts using useradd. Either convert those packages to use sysusers.d (https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Packaging_guidelines#Users_and_Groups) or, as a quickest measure, usually helpful if no other package relies on the same users, manually add the respective Provides: user(USERNAME) and Provides: group(GROUPNAME) to the package generating the relevant user (as done for example in cluster-glue, https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/1138101 for reference)

If you have any questions or need with your package, the opensuse-packaging mailing list is always at your disposal.

Ana,

on behalf of the Release Team