openSUSE Factory development is going steady and our venerable release manager has made a first milestone available. No development schedule has yet been determined, although it has been decided that we will aim for a release in November of this year. Major changes include X, Y and Z.

Release Plans

Our normal 8-month release cycle would warrant a release in July, but the openSUSE team has proposed to change the schedule due to the work they are doing on our tooling and infrastructure. In the discussions on our mailing list it became clear a November release has much support. This is now the tentative plan and we will decide the specific schedule as well as who’s gonna do what and where at the upcoming openSUSE Conference in Dubrovnik.

Meanwhile, the openSUSE team is asking for feedback, bug hunting and fixing of the new-and-improved openQA and Staging tools for the Open Build Service.

Changes in the first milestone

Although we’re just at the start of our release cycle, this milestone already introduces a number of significant changes. Plans on what exactly will be included will be created at oSC14 next month.

• The btrfs filesystem is default (and comes with btrfsprogs 3.12), as is the wicked network management tool (replacing ifup) and the dracut initrd replacement

• YaST sports a new look and its Qt front-end is ported to Qt5

• Zypper is at the 1.10.x branch for the next release, introducing a number of bug fixes and minor improvements

• KDE Frameworks 5 packages are included, as well as the latest Application and Platform releases in the 4.x series

• Our infrastructure is updated: rpm 4.11.2 introduces weak dependencies, PackageKit 0.8.16 comes with a new appdata format and there are binutils .24, Bluez 5.15, systemd 210, pulseaudio at 5.0 and the latest 3.14RC kernel

• In the graphics area we now have packages for wayland 1.4, freetype 2.5.2 (changing font weights) and Mesa 10.1

• Cloud and databases bring xen 4.4, virtualbox 4.3.8 and postgresql 9.3.

• For developers we’ve included GCC 4.9 (default still 4.8.2), make 4.0, llvm 3.4, cmake 3.0(rc), gdb 7.7, git 1.9.0 and subversion 1.8.8

• In the language area, we’ve now got ruby 2.1, php5 5.5.9 and python 2.7.6 and 3.4.0(rc)

Getting and playing

You can get the milestone as usual on software.opensuse.org/developer. You can get involved in development discussions on the factory mailing list (subscribe).

Have a lot of fun!