openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2020/06

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

This week I canceled more snapshots than I released – only 2 snapshots have been sent out (0201 and 0205). Feels quite bad, but on the other hand, I’m glad we have openQA protecting you, the openSUSE Tumbleweed users, from those issues. As the -factory mailing list shows this week, despite all the testing, we can’t ever predict all the special cases found on our users’ machines.

So, what was happening this week:

• Qt 5.14.1
• SQLite 3.31.1
• Virtualbox 6.1.2
• Mesa 19.3.3
• chkconfig moved from aaa_base to insserv-compat (if you have some legacy init scripts around from a package that does not specify this dependency, please file a bug)
• netcfg – the topic on the mailing list: /etc/services, /etc/protocols and /etc/ethers moved to /usr/etc. Two major sources for errors on user machines have been identified:
  • users ignoring *.rpmnew files and nor merging the config changes from packages into their own config (in this specific case for /etc/nsswitch.conf)
  • Some people seem to have removed even patterns-base-minimal_base, which resulted in those users not having libnss_usrfiles2 being pulled in. As a result, even if the config file was maintained/corrected, the services file could not be found.
  • Both issues are being attempted to be resolved: libnss_usrfiles2 is not only required by the pattern, but also by netcfg (netcfg sets the default config, so we thought this is the best point) and aaa_base tries to correct /etc/nsswitch.conf (but that results in ursfiles being added again, even if the user would have explicitly removed it)

I hope we could help everybody recover their system in a proper way by now, and that the future goal – having as few as possible files in /etc config from the distribution – is something you can follow as a rationale. Besides that, the stagings are still filled with these things:

• KDE Applications 19.12.2
• KDE Plasma 5.18
• Linux Kernel 5.5.1
• Python 3.8 (salt, hopefully going to be unblocking soon)
• Removal of python 2
• glibc 2.31
• GNU make 4.3
• libcap 2.30: breaks fakeroot and drpm
• RPM: change of the database format to ndb
• elfutils: adding support for debuginfod