Tumbleweed Now Has Ratings for Snapshots

Major Krita Release Arrives in Tumbleweed

openSUSE’s rolling distribution Tumbleweed produces high-quality snapshots and a new rating tool for the snapshots has labeled two out of the last four snapshots as stable.

The past two snapshots are still pending a rating as it takes about a week after the snapshot release to develop a rating. This blog will cover the last two snapshots that are pending and list some of the new software that arrived in the snapshots.

The most recent snapshot, 20180326, had several new packages including python-packaging 17.1 and python-setuptools 39.0.1. The  python-packaging 17.1 dropped support for python 2.6, 3.2, and 3.3. The update version python-setuptools from 38.5.2 to 39.0.1 now vendors its own direct dependencies and no longer relies on the dependencies as vendored by pkg_resources. The C library for reading, creating, and modifying zip archive, libzip 1.5.0, enabled more functionality by updating dependencies and simplified the licence by the use of a standard cryptographic library instead of custom Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) implementation. IRC client hexchat 2.14.1 made some changes to the preferences so the window can be scroll-able. GNOME’s messaging program empathy reverted back to version 3.12.14 and gnome-documents 3.28.0 updated translations and replaced pkgconfig(libgepub) with pkgconfig(libgepub-0.6). The Linux Kernel 4.15.13 became available in the snapshot, which added the Intel Total Memory Encryption feature, and YaST had several packages updated including autoyast2 4.0.44, which can properly abort when probing devices fails during installation.

Snapshot 20180324 brought KDE Applications 17.12.3. Applications had improvements to Akregator, Gwenview and Okular as well as bug fixes for Kontact, Dolphin, Umbrello and more. The compression and decompression utility Ark fixed the build with Qt 5.11. KDE’s application suite Calligra updated to version 3.1.0 and fixed a typo in User Interface string. Both gnome-photos and gnome-music were updated in this snapshot. Translations were updated for the gtksourceview 3.24.7 package. The painting program Krita had a major version update to 4.0.0; the new version has a new Colorize Mask Tool for easy coloring of line-art and new brush presets. Network mapper nmap 7.70 added 14 new Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) scripts. Transmission 2.93 fixed a crash on the handshake if establishing a Diffie-Hellman shared secret fails. The 4.15.11 Linux Kernel was updated in the 20180324 snapshot.

The snapshots from the previous week were covered in a Weekly Review of Tumbleweed email by release manager Dominique Leuenberger, who posted it on the openSUSE Factory Mailing List.