Tumbleweed Snapshots Are Steadily Rolling

Four openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshot were released this week bringing updates for Kerberos, GNOME, KDE, YaST and Mozilla Firefox.

The latest snapshot of the week, 20190219, had more than a dozen packages updated. A new Kerberos database module using the Lightning Memory-Mapped Database library (LMDB) has was added with the krb5 1.17 package, which brought some major changes for the administration experience for the network authentication protocol Kerberos. The permissions package update 20190212 removed several old entries and the kernel-space and user-space code package tgt 1.0.74 fixed builds with the newer glibc. A couple xf86 packages were updated. The 1.4.0 version of xf86-video-chips was a bug fix release for X.Org Server. There was an X Server crash bug with the version 1.3 affecting devices older than the HiQVideo generation. The change log said the code may not compile against X Server 1.20 since it no longer supports 24-bit color. A few other YaST packages were updated in the snapshot like yast2-installation 4.1.36, which had an update that saves the used repositories at the end of installation so as not to offer the driver packages again.

The 20190217 snapshot had just three packages updated. The keyboard management library libgnomekbd 3.26.1 fixed a build with new GLib and updated translations. VMcore extraction tool makedumpfile 1.6.5 added some patches, bug fixes and improved support for arm64 systems with Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR). The jump in the release of yast2-storage-ng from 4.1.53 to 4.1.59 provided quite a few changes like allowing the partitioner to create block cache (bcache) devices without a caching set and the newest version limits bcache support to x86_64.

The 20190215 snapshot finished the updates of KDE Applications 18.12.2 and KDE Frameworks 5.55.0, which started in the snapshot the day before. Multiple packages were updated in KDE Frameworks 5.55.0. Breeze Icons added a preferences-desktop-effects icon, KIO improved keyboard controls of the checksum widget, KTextEditor added a cancel button to stop long-running tasks in the search bar and KWayland added rows info to the plasma virtual desktop protocol. KDE Applications 18.12.2 had more than a dozen recorded bug fixes include improvements to Kontact, Ark, Konsole, Lokalize, Umbrello, and others. The address book now remembers birthdays when merging contacts from a bug fix with kdepim-addons and Ark no longer deletes files saved from inside the embedded viewer. An update to autoyast2 4.1.1 for the installation made changes to the reading of the IPv6 setting in order to initialize it correctly. Unit test were made in the libstorage-ng 4.1.88 package and it also had a change to detect Direct-Access Storage Devices (DASD) using virtio-blk. The python-cairocffi 0.9.0 package dropped Python 3.2 and 3.3 support. Several other YaST packages were updated in the snapshot including yast2-bootloader 4.1.17, yast2-configuration-management 4.1.3, yast2-firstboot 4.1.5 and yast2-network 4.1.39.

The snapshot that started the week 20190214 brought the newest Mozilla Firefox 65.0. One of the changes to the browser is an updated language section in preferences that allows users to install multiple language packs and order language preferences for Firefox and websites without having to download locale-specific versions. KDE had several updates in this snapshot. Both KDE Applications 18.12.2 and KDE Frameworks 5.55.0 packages started updating in this snapshot and KDE Plasma 5.15.0 was also released in this snapshot. Plasma 5.15 brings a number of changes to the configuration interfaces, including more options for complex network configurations. Many icons have been added or redesigned to make them clearer. Integration with third-party technologies like GTK and Firefox improved substantially.  GNOME’s Almería release received a minor update to the gnome-desktop 3.30.2.1 and other GNOME 3.30.3 packages. Both the KDE and GNOME projects are also highly active with developing package management and application virtualization for the Linux desktop through Flatpak. The new 1.2.0 version of Flatpak generated a fontconfig directory remapping snippet since it will be needed for a newer versions of fontconfig. The ImageMagick 7.0.8.26 version fixed a number of issues listed on github, which brought the amount of open issues to 62. Several other packages were updated in the snapshot. Updates of cups-filters 1.22.0, libostree 2019.1, python-qt5 5.12 and shotwell 0.30.2 were among the most notable package updates.

The quality of the snapshots have steadily improved this week according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.Snapshot 20190215 through 20190219 are trending at stable with a rating above 90 as of the publishing of this article. The 20190214 snapshot has a moderate rating of 83.