Tumbleweed Snapshots Rate Top-Notch, Get Krita, QEMU, Mesa Updates

There were 20 openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots released in the month of November and the snapshots brought in a large amount of updated packages to include KDE Applications 19.08.3, Frameworks 5.64.0 Plasma 5.17.2 and 5.17.3, Linux kernel 5.3.9 and 5.3.11, Mozilla Firefox 70, libvirt 5.9.0 and more. During the month, even Java 12 OpenJDK was dropped from the distribution.

One of the more amazing aspects of Tumbleweed in November, 2020, is that the last 10 snapshots of the month all produced a constant level of stable rating and the last seven had rating of 99 out of 100, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

Closing out the month, there were two snapshots with version upgrades and one snapshot (20191127) that produced some minor changes to a couple Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) packages.

The first Tumbleweed snapshot for December arrived with the 20191202 snapshot. Updated were also made to ALSA with the update of the 1.2.1.1 versions of alsa-plugins, alsa-utils and asla, which dropped 25 patches and fixed regressions for the UCM parser. GNOME had several package updates for gedit, evolution and more. The 3.34.2 version of gnome-software fixed a potential threading crash when using flatpak and had an upstream fix for fwupd. An updated version of ModemManager 1.12.0, which is a DBus-activated daemon that controls mobile broadband devices and connections, had a large amount of improvements and changes to include adding support for Mobile Station Based Assisted-GPS in addition to Mobile Station Assisted Assisted-GPS. Revision control tool mercurial 5.2 made some backwards compatibility changes and added some new feature extensions with its quarterly release. The update of perl 5.30.1 triggered an issue recorded on the snapshot reviewer because the newer version and patch that came in it is problematic for embedded Perl usage. Several other packages were updated in the snapshot to include qemu 4.1.93, re2 20191101, xen and xorg-x11-server. The one major version change in the snapshot was an update to terminal multiplexer tmux 3.0a; the major release that allows its users to easily switch between several programs in one terminal offers new features like added support for the SD (scroll down) escape sequence and for underscore colors.

There were several RubyGems packages updated in snapshot 20191128, but the digital paint application Krita had the most fixes. Krita 4.2.8.2 removed the CSV export filter that had not worked in a long time and fixed the crop tool that loses a constant ratio when the handles touched the canvas edge. The 2.22.0 tuned package, which is a daemon for monitoring and adaptive tuning of system devices, fixed a bug that makes use of the self defined profile_dir argument instead of libexecdir. November’’s update of the wireguard package, which is a free and open-source software application and communication protocol for point-to-point connections, added a syncconf command and changed the wg-quick tool to only touch net.ipv4 for v4 addresses.

The 3D Graphics Library Mesa 19.2.6 arrived in snapshot 20191126 and fixed builds on PowerPC and added some stability patches. The digital audio editor and recording application audacity 2.3.3 added several improvements like splitting the equalization effect into two Filter Curve and Graphic EQ effects; the package update also fixed some crashes and the software’s refusal to export some large (4GB) files. The bind 9.14.8, package, which provides a DNS server and client utilities, set a limit on the number of concurrently served pipelined TCP queries and added support for the GeoIP2 Application Programming Interface (API) from MaxMind. The Antivirus Toolkit clamav updated to version 0.102.1 and introduced a new configure option to statically link libjson-c with libclamav and added support for HTTPS. The exo 0.12.10 for the Xfce desktop fix typeahead search regression and firewalld 0.7.2 added 15 new service definitions and provided a new option FlushAllOnReload in firewalld.conf. Improved experimental support was made for building Node.js with Python3 in the nodejs 12.13.1 long-term-support package. Python-networkx 2.4 added support for Python 3.8 and home media solution rygel 0.38.3 were also updated in the snapshot.

In an email this week, Tumbleweed Release manager Dominique Leuenberger indicated that a build fail notification for the python-numba package in openSUSE Factory has not been addressed for the past four weeks and unless somebody steps up and submits fixes, the python-numba will be removed.