Plasma, Gear, Frameworks update in Tumbleweed

This week’s openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots had several KDE packages updated and an update affecting scripts related to grep.

In addition to some changes with YaST affecting grep, the rolling release had snapshots updating Plasma, Gear and Frameworks in that order.

Snapshot 20220914 is finishing testing and the snapshot could be released before this article is published, which would make this week another full week of snapshots if the testing passes openQA.

Frameworks 5.98.0 arrived in snapshot 20220913. The update deduplicated color loading codes with KConfigWidgets and Kirigami had a fix for a potential crash in imagecolors. Frameworks also delivered a lot of additions and fixes to KTextEditor. There were some fixes of inconsistencies in the completion config tab and KTextEditor enabled the clipboard history with non read-only. An update of fetchmail 6.4.33 removed an upstream patch and a wrapper script for HTMLDOC was added for use with Flatpak because the snapd version was broken. Audio format flac 1.4.0 added a FMA instruction set extension to speed up audio for x86_64 CPUs. There is also now a set of files available to test whether a FLAC decoder implements the format correctly. The update of libstorage-ng 4.5.44 fixed the resizing of Linux Unified Key Setup and did some Czech translations. Also updated in the snapshot was the 4.5.4 versions of yast2-bootloader and yast2-kdump.

Just a few packages were updated in snapshot 20220912. Caching proxy package squid 5.7 fixed a regression and a handful of bugs. The package now supports OpenSSL 3.0. An update of the smartcard middleware library pcsc-lite 1.9.9 made some minor improvements and improved the log from the smartcard daemon to log the return code in text instead of hex. A fix to a missing comma in the JSON output of tree 2.0.4 was made and yast2-trans had multiple translations updates for German and Czech.

Device mapper package multipath-tools had its second update of the week in snapshot 20220911. The other package to update in the snapshot was the font drawing library libXft 2.3.6, which fixes a regression in 2.3.5 for dimension-length checks.

The 20220910 snapshot focused on a VERY IMPORTANT update to autoyast2 4.5.4, which replaced egrep with grep -E. This is important to Tumbleweed users to pay attention to as the package replaces obsolete egrep with grep -E. Both egrep and fgrep are deprecated in favor of grep -E and grep -F and a deprecation warning output can break output-parsing scripts. This grep -E change also were listed in yast2 4.5.13, yast2-printer 4.5.2 and yast2-scanner 4.5.1 version updates. The kernel-source updated to 5.19.8. The Linux Kernel had a fix for a memory leak for virtual multilayer switch Open vSwitch. The kernel added a Rosewill USB adapter dongle to the device tables and most of there fixes were related to Bluetooth in this kernel update. Other packages to update in the snapshot were a Plymouth 22.02.122 version, gnome-browser-connector 42.1, ibus-table 1.16.12 and more.

KDE applications were updated in snapshot 20220909 with the update of Gear 22.08.1. Updates to video editor Kdenlive fixed a broken paste clip if trying to paste an invalid clip. The package also made sure that tasks are properly terminated upon closing and had a fix for an incorrect lock that could cause corruption. Some logic and internationalization fixes were made in KMail. News on the starting page was disable with KDevelop as the section is currently unmaintained. Network Time Protocol (NTP) package chrony improved stability with hardware timestamping in its 4.3 version update; it also improved the filter option to better handle missing NTP samples. Some changes with the yast2-core 4.5.4 and yast2-hardware-detection 4.5.1 updates are important for Tumbleweed users becasuse these packages replaced obsolete fgrep with grep -F; egrep and fgrep are both deprecated in favor of grep -E and grep -F. There is a deprecation warning output that can break output-parsing scripts, so be careful Tumbleweed users. Another package to update in the snapshot was multipath-tools.

KDE users received the update of Plasma 5.25.5 in snapshot 20220908, which seems to address a few touchy topics. This bugfix version disabled the Plasma Desktop drag and drop for touch; it conflicted with drag/flick scrolling. The drag and drop was deemed less important than scrolling or opening the context menu for touch. Some brightness actions were changed with PowerDevil and configuration modules for Plasma Workspace now considers the GTK theme setting when computing the default state. A problem with scrolling animations was also fixed in the gtk4 4.8.0 package update. The snapshot also improved the handling of OpenType-font features with the toolkit. Another package to update in the snapshot was Mozilla Firefox 104.0.2. The package fixed a bug making it impossible to use touch or use a stylus to drag the scrollbar on pages. Other packages to update in the snapshot were ipmitool 1.8.19.0, libssh 0.10.4, yast2-network 4.5.6 and more.