Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Week 34 seemed to go almost without drama. Most snapshots passed openQA without big incidents. Most! In one snapshot, we tested updating to openSSH 9.8p1—general functionality was fine. Still, the SELinux policies have not yet been adjusted, which resulted in OpenSSH servers not starting up on MicroOS-based systems. This is nothing we want to give out to our users so we held back snapshot 0821. This will be worked out and openSSH 9.8p1 will be delivered as soon as possible. With this taken into account, 5 snapshots passed QA and could be published (0816, 0817, 0818, 0819, and 0820)

The five snapshots brought you the following changes:

• Linux kernel 6.10.5: this helped unblock the s390 port
• PCRE2 10.44
• PHP 8.3.10
• Bash 5.2.32
• systemd 256.5
• osc 1.9.0, fixing CVE-2024-22034. The file storage on disk has been updated, which causes issues with obs-service-source_validator not being able to handle the new layout. A fix is being worked on (https://github.com/openSUSE/obs-service-source_validator/pull/141) and we will deliver this as part of the Update channel and in future snapshots as soon as possible.

Looking at the staging areas, it seems like the vacation period is ending – and more things are getting ready soon. Currently, the teams are working on those changes:

• LibreOffice 24.8.0
• KDE Gear 24.08.0
• Mozilla Firefox 129.0.1
• perl-Bootloader will be renamed to update-bootloader: it’s been a while since there was no perl code in there anymore
• dbus-broker: All staging tests have passed. We plan on integrating this into full snapshots early next week
• GCC 14: phase 2: use gcc14 as the default compiler – All relevant build failures in Ring0 and Ring1 have been resolved. This has moved ‘up’ (to Staging:O) to get Staging QA runs. In rare cases, this might find some runtime issues stemming from the new compiler, but we do not think this would happen. Taking current progress into account, we should be able to switch by the end of August (dates are predictions, no commitment)

For many years, the official syslog-ng container and development containers were based on Debian Testing. We are switching to Debian Stable now. Learn about the history and the reasons for the change now.

Read more at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/we-are-switching-syslog-ng-containers-from-debian-testing-to-stable

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Week 33 was busy, but busy in a good way. We managed to clear almost all stagings out, except the ‘long lasting’ topics like GCC, and dbus-broker, which we carried for a few weeks already. Other than that, the queue has been emptied (At the time of writing, there are now 54 pending requests to Factory). Summer vacation helped us achieve this result. And the fact, that we produced 7 snapshots (one discarded) during the last week.

The six published snapshots (0809, 0810, 0811, 0812, 0813, and 0815) brought you those changes:

• GCC 13.3.1
• glibc 2.40
• KDE Frameworks 6.5.0
• Mozilla Firefox 129.0
• NetworkManager 1.48.8
• binutils 2.43
• cURL 8.9.1
• Linux kernel 6.10.4
• GO 1.22 has become the new default Go compiler version
• FFMPEG default has switched from version 6 to version 7

As mentioned, stagings are almost empty – the few things currently left are:

• Linux kernel 6.10.5
• dbus-broker: some progress was made last week; most QA tests are fine, there is just a race condition on shutdown (likely not new, but dbus-daemon might have waited longer to report it, by when the system had completely shut down and the error has been ‘swallowed’)
• GCC 14: phase 2: use gcc14 as the default compiler – great progress has been made and we believe we will be able to switch during Week 34

The August syslog-ng newsletter is now on-line:

• Version 4.8.0 of syslog-ng improves FreeBSD and MacOS support
• syslog-ng Prometheus exporter
• Experimental syslog-ng packages for Amazon Linux 2023

It is available at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/the-syslog-ng-insider-2024-08-4-8-0-release-prometheus-amazon-linux

We’ve introduced several new features in OBS designed to foster collaboration among OBS users. Customized labels for better organization, setting custom links for your bug tracker and markdown formatting for project/package descriptions. Those features are intended to give you more insight into your work, helping you stay focused on what matters most. These updates are part of the Foster Collaboration and Labels beta programs. You can find more information about the beta program here. Introduction...

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Despite the summer vacation period being in full swing, there is enough throughput to produce snapshots. During the last week, we created 6 of them, of which 5 could be published (The failed one was held back due to issues uncovered with Mesa 21.1.5, see https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1228164 for details).

The five delivered snapshots (0803, 0805, 0806, 0807, and 0808) contained these changes:

• GCC 14.2
• GStreamer 1.24.6
• libzypp 17.35.9
• Shim 15.8
• Linux kernel 6.10.3
• libxml 2.12.9
• Procps 4 (no longer as an alternative, but as a native replacement of procps 3.x)
• fwupd 1.9.23
• GNOME 46.4
• KDE Plasma 6.1.4

Staging projects are currently busy building test distributions and running QA on these changes:

• glibc 2.40
• Rust 1.80
• KDE Frameworks 6.5.0
• cURL 8.9.1: breaks test suites of libzypp and python-tornado6
• nftables 1.1.0: openQA is far from happy; nftables’ python bindings seem not to work
• go 1.22 as default: only transactional-update-notifier seems to be blocking
• Switch the default ffmpeg version from 6 to 7: xine-lib as the only blocker. A submit request is pending for the development project
• dbus-broker: some progress was made last week; most QA tests are fine, there is just a race condition on shutdown (likely not new, but dbus-daemon might have waited longer to report it, by when the system had completely shut down and the error has been ‘swallowed’)
• GCC 14: phase 2: use gcc14 as the default compiler – lots of help needed: https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/openSUSE:Factory:Staging:Gcc7

I had a mild annoyance when trying to browse the Steam store on multiple machines. The screen was just blank. I didn’t do anything about it immediately because I could browse the store on Firefox. What was also weird is that although the Community and my user page were also blank, the library was not. … Continue reading Steam Store Blank Fix on openSUSE →

A few weeks ago I was in Lille, France for Pass the SALT, a conference focused on open-source software and security, and gave a training on sudo. Ever since the conference, I’ve been approached by people asking if I could give sudo training(s) for or through their organization. Instead of writing a short answer to everyone in private, here is more detailed public response.

The short answer: it depends :-)

The long answer is a bit more complicated, but it’s well summarized in the short answer. Why?

First of all: I am not a trainer. Yes, I taught various subjects at university level, both as a graduate and as a PhD student. Along the way, I also provided introductory Linux training for banks and various certificate preparations. However, it was a long time ago in the galaxy. Yes, I can teach, but it is not my primary focus.

I am an open-source contributor, evangelist, and product guy. Sharing knowledge, training, teaching, name it whatever you want, is just a small part of my job and my interests. Both as an evangelist and product guy, learning from my audience equally important. Visitors of the Pass the SALT conference are very open to discussions, both during the training and in the hallway. Many of the sudo 1.9 features were born from discussions at this conference. Unfortunately, a traditional teacher-student setup, especially if it is in a virtual classroom, makes this two way communication and learning impossible. I am more of a product guy than a teacher, so I’m not that interested in simply teaching. You can find my article on the evangelist mindset at: https://opensource.com/article/21/1/open-source-evangelist

Secondly: I am not a sudo expert. Yes, I know some of the most advanced sudo features. I helped in designing, testing and issue reporting some of them. However, I’m not a practicing sysadmin anymore. I know the basics of sudo, and some of the most advanced or most recent features, but not much in-between. Over 90% of the people at my sudo talks and training have never heard about the advanced features I talk about, and most of them go home planning to test at least some of them in their environments. On the other hand, unlike me, they have some solid sudo foundations. They are interested in the advanced stuff.

TL;DR: I am very happy to go to conferences in real life, where I have a chance to have a two way communication with the audience. Where I do not have to teach the basics, and it is not just teaching, but also a discussion with active sudo users.

If you still think that I can be of any help for you, you can contact me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon. You can find more details in the upper right corner of my blog.

PS: if you are a BSD guy, come to my training session at the EuroBSD conference: https://events.eurobsdcon.org/2024/talk/FLCHU3/

We kicked off a new feature in OBS. The goal is to have a unified way of listing requests for all the different places like packages, projects and what is currently found under “Tasks”. We started this by porting some of the core functionality of the “Tasks” page to the new unified version with a couple of search and filter options. The Request Index feature is part of the beta program and the requests list...

The Freedesktop.org Specifications directory contains a list of common specifications that have accumulated over the decades and define how common desktop environment functionality works. The specifications are designed to increase interoperability between desktops. Common specifications make the life of both desktop-environment developers and especially application developers (who will almost always want to maximize the amount of Linux DEs their app can run on and behave as expected, to increase their apps target audience) a lot easier.

Unfortunately, building the HTML specifications and maintaining the directory of available specs has become a bit of a difficult chore, as the pipeline for building the site has become fairly old and unmaintained (parts of it still depended on Python 2). In order to make my life of maintaining this part of Freedesktop easier, I aimed to carefully modernize the website. I do have bigger plans to maybe eventually restructure the site to make it easier to navigate and not just a plain alphabetical list of specifications, and to integrate it with the Wiki, but in the interest of backwards compatibility and to get anything done in time (rather than taking on a mega-project that can’t be finished), I decided to just do the minimum modernization first to get a viable website, and do the rest later.

So, long story short: Most Freedesktop specs are written in DocBook XML. Some were plain HTML documents, some were DocBook SGML, a few were plaintext files. To make things easier to maintain, almost every specification is written in DocBook now. This also simplifies the review process and we may be able to switch to something else like AsciiDoc later if we want to. Of course, one could have switched to something else than DocBook, but that would have been a much bigger chore with a lot more broken links, and I did not want this to become an even bigger project than it already was and keep its scope somewhat narrow.

DocBook is a markup language for documentation which has been around for a very long time, and therefore has older tooling around it. But fortunately our friends at openSUSE created DAPS (DocBook Authoring and Publishing Suite) as a modern way to render DocBook documents to HTML and other file formats. DAPS is now used to generate all Freedesktop specifications on our website. The website index and the specification revisions are also now defined in structured TOML files, to make them easier to read and to extend. A bunch of specifications that had been missing from the original website are also added to the index and rendered on the website now.

Originally, I wanted to put the website live in a temporary location and solicit feedback, especially since some links have changed and not everything may have redirects. However, due to how GitLab Pages worked (and due to me not knowing GitLab CI well enough…) the changes went live before their MR was actually merged. Rather than reverting the change, I decided to keep it (as the old website did not build properly anymore) and to see if anything breaks. So far, no dead links or bad side effects have been observed, but:

If you notice any broken link to specifications.fd.o or anything else weird, please file a bug so that we can fix it!

Thank you, and I hope you enjoy reading the specifications in better rendering and more coherent look!