Frequent snapshots of openSUSE’s rolling release Tumbleweed brought KDE enthusiasts freshly made software this week.

KDE Gear and KDE Frameworks were released in two of the past four snapshots.

The 20230613 snapshot had a little something for Xfce users as well. Panel layouts were updated in the xfce4-panel-profiles update; the 1.0.14 version fixed the files list and permissions of installed files. The package also added some missing translatable flags as well as provided some filename consistency. The Linux Kernel updated in the snapshot; kernel-source 6.3.7 fixed a possible memory leak had some enhancements for Transmission Control Protocol. The kernel also fixed an unused variable warning with RISC-V. In the perl-Image-ExifTool version 12.63 update, support was added for reading 7z files and warnings for certain scenarios were made. An update of libzypp 17.31.13 and the free implementation of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm package fribidi 1.0.13 was also updated in the snapsthor.

Snapshot 20230612 brought an update of 3D Graphics Library Mesa; there was a removal of the meson option -Ddri-drivers with the 23.1.2 version update since it is no longer used, and Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) functionality will no longer be available for Radeon R300 graphics cards.An update of systemd 253.5 took a new approach to trigger re-execution for user managers on package updates that is safer and less problematic than the previous systemctl --user -M 1000@ daemon-reexec command. KDE Frameworks 5.107.0 updated in the snapshot. There was a deprecation of KIO access manager and related classes. The package also enables thumbnail caching if the thumbnail directory is on an encrypted volume. An update of Kirigami disables shortcuts for invisible and disables text fields in the ActionTextField and it improves the painting of icons in the documentation. The reliability and correctness of image processing and conversion was made with changes to KImageFormats’ as part of the Frameworks update. An update of Mozilla Firefox 114.0.1 introduced a User Interface for managing DNS over a HTTPS exception list and Linux can now use web-standard support for USB with FIDO2’s WebAuthn. An update of AppArmor 3.1.5 had a fix for handling mount rules, removed a patch and prevented a warning about a non-existing directory when loading profiles in Tumbleweed builds. Several other packages update in the snapshot including zchunk 1.3.1, hwdata 0.371, xwayland 23.1.2 and several others.

KDE Gear 23.04.2 arrived in Tumbleweed less than 48 hours after its release. Snapshot 20230610 delivered this and kitinerary was one of the packages up update; it provided enhancements to travel document parsing and extraction capabilities for Estonian, Lithuanian and Latvian railway tickets. The travel reservation package expanded support for various document types and improved data accuracy and reliability. The update of video editor Kdenlive provided a freeze fix, some performance optimizations, a minor UI improvement and had some changes for a smoother editing experience like fixing the dragging of a clip on the time that caused an out of view scroll. Gear’s Messagelib packagehad email handling improvements that fixed a crash when switching emails. There were a few other packages to update in the snapshot as well. Runtime Compiler orc 0.4.34 had some continuous integration improvements and fixed a compiler warning. An update of Perl 5.36.1 addressed a bug in a regular expression code that could trigger an interpreter to panic. A few other packages updated in the snapshot.

An update of gtk4 in snapshot 20230608 to version 4.10.4 addressed some memory leaks and made a fix to avoid some black flickering with xwayland. There was a release of kdump that helps to fix the prefix for ALP as well as adds calibrated values for this future distribution. An update of python-setuptools 67.8.0 had a modification to ensure that the .pth file properly updates and the package also had tests to ensure virtualenv works in Python 3.12. A few other package like postfix 3.8.1, yast2-storage-ng 4.6.11, and vte 0.72.2 also updated in the snapshot.

No matter how awkward you feel when you hear about UDP syslog in the age of encrypted TCP connections, UDP syslog is here to stay in some special cases. The scalability issues of UDP log collection were first addressed in syslog-ng Open Source Edition (OSE) (the so-reuseport() parameter), and later a more advanced solution arrived to syslog-ng Premium Edition (PE) (the udp-balancer() source). The good news is that a new, open-source implementation is now available as part of syslog-ng 4.2.0.

Read more about it at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/syslog-ng-4-2-extra-udp-performance

You have probably read about the release of the OpenAPI Documentation. That doesn’t mean the documentation is finished and static. On the contrary, we have recently introduced a few more endpoints and are looking forward to your contributions. Please check them out! Statistics Status Project Status Reports - Required Checks Status Reports Build Worker Status After kicking off the API documentation remake in January 2021, we’ve continued with the Build and Workers endpoints in April...

openSUSE Leap 15.5 was released earlier this week and release team would like to hear from you about your experience with openSUSE Leap 15.5.

Did anything go particularly well, or perhaps did we miss something? Did you have trouble downloading, installing, or contributing to Leap 15.5? Did you like the overall communication?

Simply head to survey.opensuse.org and tell us.

About the survey

The survey is anonymous and has only two questions “What went well? and “What didn’t go too well?”.

Leap 15.5 release retrospective survey will remain open for two weeks from the release, until 21st June.

We’re using our own instance of LimeSurvey as the platform.

How will the data be used?

Past that, we’ll announce a few rounds of public review meetings, where we’ll review and categorize feedback (see feedback from previous releases) and will try to come up with action items to address issues.

Opportunity to recognize teams or individuals

If you’d like to recognize some of the contributors please do so! We’ll use it as input for release recognition e-thank-you emails. Both teams or individuals will be happy to see that you appreciate their efforts!

Everybody is welcome to help us with the recognition effort feel free to participate on Github.

Feedback from previous releases

Leap 15.2 retrospective results
Leap 15.3 retrospective results
Leap 15.4 retrospective results

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NUREMBERG, Germany – The release of openSUSE’s latest 15-series version marks years of maintenance and security that began more than five years ago.

The maturity of Leap 15.5 comes into play as new technological changes of the last five years have been introduced, such as container technologies, immutable systems, virtualization, embedded development, and other high-tech advances.

Entrepreneurs, hobbyists, professionals and developers use Leap as a go-to Linux distribution as seen by the increase in usage from each minor release. Traversing from legacy software to more modern systems is imminent.

Leap 15.5, which is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 5, will receive maintenance and security updates until the end of 2024. This will provide users with plenty of time to transition to the release’s successor; a successor has yet to be confirmed. Users interested in commercial support can use a new tool to transition to commercial support. Leap can be downloaded at get.opensuse.org.

This release brings newer packages like Mesa and others, but Leap 15.5 is a non-feature release. Some of these newer packages to highlight include KDE Plasma 5.27, which is a Plasma Long Term Support version until the next one rolls out in 2024. Konqi lovers will enjoy a new welcome wizard, dynamic customization of desktop workspaces and more functionality with KRunner that includes a full desktop search, unit and currency exchange rate conversions, dictionary definitions, calculator features, and it shows graphical representations of mathematical functions. The Color Picker had a few improvements and added the possibility of displaying another preview color circle. KDE Gear 22.12.3 will be a new package in the release and complement the use of Plasma 5.27. The update fixes bugs with the Desktop Environment applications and highlights the enhancement of compression/decompression utility ark, improvements to text editor Kate and fixes some crashing of the video editor Kdenlive. Qt 5.15 LTS is available with the KDE Qt 5 patch collection.

Text editor Vim will upgrade to a new major version. Vim 9 has a new script language that drastically improves performance. Increases in execution speed of 10 to 100 times is expected for the text editor. Users are recommended to read the project’s Vim 9.0 release information to know how the upgrade affects legacy scripts, backwards compatibility and other new features added in the release.

For professionals configuring networking of Linux containers, the netavark 1.5.0 package is in the release. Users who have already transitioned to Flatpaks will have an updated 1.14.4 version that addresses a Common Vulnerability and Exposure with CVE-2023-28101. The newer version fixes the hiding of permissions for an attacker publishing a Flatpak app with malicious intent to elevate permissions.

Leap 15.5 is set to have the OpenH264 repository enabled by default for all new installations thanks to contributions from Open Source at Cisco.

Leap 15.5 comes with Linux Kernel 5.14.21 that including backports for this SUSE specific LTS kernel. Leap 15.5 shares the kernel with SLE 15 SP5 that receives the same fixes and backports along, which includes a few thousand other shared packages. The device firmware updater package fwupd will change to version 1.8.6. The newer version fixes compiling errors when building for s390x and ppc64le

Good news for Python developers. Leap 15.5 users will have a fully usable Python 3.11 stack in parallel to the system Python (python36). This provides a more modern release for users and developers. Packagers are advised to switch to Python 3.11.

Other packages users may notice a change to are updates of Ugrep 3.11.0 and NetworkManager 1.38.6. Both webkit2gtk3 and webkit2gtk4 will update to version 2.38.5. Mozilla’s internet browser Firefox will get a new Extended Support Release version - 102.9.0. Mozilla’s email client Thunderbird gains various visual and user experience improvements with version 102.8.0.

End of Life

openSUSE Leap 15.4 will have its End of Life (EOL) six months from today’s release. Users should update to openSUSE Leap 15.5 within six months of today to continue to receive security and maintenance updates.

Important for users upgrading from previous versions

A new 4096-bit RSA signing key was introduced as part of openSUSE Leap 15.5 as well as 15.4 via a maintenance update. Leap 15.4 users are expected to update their system prior to upgrade of 15.5. For more information, visit https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:System_upgrade#0._New_4096_bit_RSA_signing_key

Download Leap 15.5

To download the ISO image, visit https://get.opensuse.org/leap/

Questions

If you have a question about the release or found a bug, we’d love to hear from you at:

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Get involved

The openSUSE Project is a worldwide community that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. It creates two of the world’s best Linux distributions, the Tumbleweed rolling-release, and Leap, the hybrid enterprise-community distribution. openSUSE is continuously working together in an open, transparent and friendly manner as part of the worldwide Free and Open Source Software community. The project is controlled by its community and relies on the contributions of individuals, working as testers, writers, translators, usability experts, artists and ambassadors or developers. The project embraces a wide variety of technology, people with different levels of expertise, speaking different languages and having different cultural backgrounds. Learn more about it on opensuse.org.

We’d like to announce that the openSUSE Release team plans to work on openSUSE Leap 15.6.

openSUSE Leap 15.6 is expected to be released in early June 2024 and would reach its end of life by the end of the year 2025.

This decision was based on recent discussions at SUSE Labs and openSUSE Conference, and it reflects recent changes, progress on individual projects, and our new distribution architect.

This will also enable us to provide SUSE customers with an updated Package HUB module, as both SLES 15 SP5 and Leap 15.6 would be considered a feature release based on our tick-tock release model.

With a Leap 15.6, more time is given for efforts related to an ALP-based Leap 15.X successor.

A more detailed explanation of the situation at lkocman’s oSC2023 “Leap 16.0?” talk. Recording should be available within a few days at the openSUSE youtube channel.

One of the returning syslog-ng questions I receive is how many log messages can a given hardware handle. My typical answer is that it depends on the configuration. I have now an answer, or rather a tool to answer your question: sngbench.sh. It is a shell script that runs from localhost and uses loggen, the bundled benchmarking and testing tool of syslog-ng. It comes with two configurations: a performance-optimized and a realistic one. You are also free to extend sngbench with your own configurations.

Read more at https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/introducing-sngbench-a-shell-script-to-performance-test-your-syslog-ng

Starting today, the OpenAPI Specification presented through Swagger UI becomes the official API documentation for Open Build Service 🎉 Find it at https://api.opensuse.org/apidocs/ With OpenAPI we now provide an industry standard way to maintain the specification and with Swagger UI a tool that makes consuming the documentation easier for people who want to make use of the OBS API in their code. Now our journey to remake the API documentation has come to an end,...

Adding Python 3.11 to Leap 15.4 and newer

Leap has a default Python interpreter that’s “too old”. In Leap, python3 is Python 3.6 that reached upstream end of life at the end of 2021. The current version in Leap is based on SUSE SLES 15, so it’s supported by SUSE, but it’s not something easy to use with modern python modules.

Today it’s also possible to install a more modern Python interpreter in Leap, the python310 and python310-pip packages are in the repositories and you can install and use the virtualenv module to install from PyPI, and python311 will be available in Leap 15.5 when released.

But sometimes that’s not enough, some python modules requires non python libraries or tools to be installed and it’s not possible to use them directly from PyPI.

That’s the reason for this new Python interpreter and modules for Leap.

This Python 3.11 and modules is a solution proposed to provide a more recent Python interpreter and basic set of updated Python modules in stable SUSE solutions, SLES, and it will be supported, so it’ll be part of the Leap releases, as Leap inherits directly from there.

The first thing to keep in mind is that this solution doesn’t bring any break changes, the primary Python is the same (3.6) and existing Python modules are not updated. The current Python 3.6 interpreter and packages stay intact. The /usr/bin/python3 binary will remain Python 3.6 for software compatibility reasons, however an additional /usr/bin/python3.11 is provided as well. The new Python Stack is an addition, that doesn’t collide with existing packages, so it can be co-installed in a system without affecting any running application.

This modern Python will be available in Leap 15.4, and following releases will inherit it, so it’ll be available also in Leap 15.5. The interpreter can be found now, but the list of modules is still under development and will arrive soon.

Python Version

The python version selected is the Python 3.11. This is the best choice because:

• Is the latest official Python version, supported by the Python Foundation.
• There are some noticeable performance improvements, compared to the previous versions.
• It’s compatible with previous versions, there are no big changes that breaks not too old Python code, so code that works in Python 3.10 or Python 3.9 will work correctly in Python 3.11 or will require small changes.

With the interpreter there is a list of Python modules that will be provided with a recent version. These Python modules, that are part of the Modern Python, will be only available with the Python 3.11 interpreter, and will be the latest version released upstream, so this new stack provides a recent Python environment with a recent interpreter and Python modules from 2023.

The list of packages will be a reduced subset of modules in Leap, around 500 packages. But it’s an initial set that will allow to build a lot more modern packages and will make the life easier for people using the Python Backports.

Impact on existing systems

All python packages in the new stack will provide the “python311-” version, so for example to install Flask you will find the package python311-Flask, python3-Flask will continue being the python 3.6 version, the one that you can find in Leap 15.4 by default.

This new Python interpreter and modules will not affect the existing systems. But the new interpreter and modules will be available in Leap 15.4 and beyond, so it’s recommended to everyone to migrate from Python 3.6 to the new Python 3.11 and try to use this modern version of the interpreter and basic python modules.

Using the packages provided by the Modern Python will bring a lot of direct benefits:

• Considerably faster Python interpreter.
• Modern Python interpreter with the latest improvements in the syntax and standard library.
• Modern Python modules with improved functionality can be used, not just the provided by the distribution, but also from PyPI.

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

First off, apologies for not having the weekly review since May 5th. There were some personal days off, some travels to conferences and things just lined up to fall through the cracks. But more importantly, than the weekly reviews, I’m sure you have all noticed that Tumbleweed has not been stopped. Au contraire: with people being all in the same time zones and proximity, we managed to resolve some of the long-standing issues in stagings and progress on. I’ll try to give an overview of what happened in the last 4 weeks.

Looking at all of May 2023, there have been a total of 29 snapshots published. The only ones skipped were 0516 and 0528. Snapshots 0501 through 0504 had been covered in week 2023/18’s review and I’ll skip them today. This brings us to this overview of what happened in the last weeks in Tumbleweed:

• iproute2 6.3
• LibreOffice 7.5.3.1 & 7.5.3.2
• Virtualbox 7.0.8
• php8 was attempted to be updated to 8.2.5, later reverted to 8.1.19 due to nextcloud incompatibilities
• Salt 3006.0
• systemd 253.4, plus the introduction of file triggers instead of relying upon packagers using all the systemd_ macros. There was an issue detected though, hinting at obs-pesign stripping the file triggers away.
• PAM 1.5.3
• Mozilla Firefox 113.0 & 113.0.1 & 113.0.2
• KDE Plasma 5.27.5
• KDE Gear 23.04.1
• KDE Frameworks 5.106.0
• OpenVPN 2.6.4
• Linux kernel 6.3.2 & 6.3.4
• SQLite 3.42.0
• LLVM 16.0.4
• GCC 13.1.1
• GStreamer 1.22.3
• QEmu 8.0.0
• The old 2k RSA signing key for openSUSE repos has been removed from default installations. The key is still valid, but not part of the default trusted keys anymore.

Things that are in the pipeline and are close to being ready – also thanks to the many in-person meetings at the SUSE Labs conference and the openSUSE Conference

• Python 3.11 as the new default Python interpreter (a few packages from the numeric stack pending confirmation)
• openSSL 3.1.1
• openSSH 9.3p1
• libxml2 2.11.4: breaks a few packages like perl-XML-LibXML, raptor, virtualbox
• fmt 10: breaks at least ceph and spdlog
• libplist 2.3.0: breaks libimobiledevice-glue
• protobuf 23.1: breaks libphonenumber, libzypp, protobuf-c, and vlc