A lot of things are happening in our Factory distribution that will be released in November 2011 as openSUSE 12.1 and I’d like to point out a few things from the last few weeks that users and developers of factory shouldn’t miss.

Roadmap openSUSE 12.1

Stephan “Coolo” Kulow has updated the openSUSE 12.1 Roadmap, the next milestone is Milestone 1 which is delayed and targeted now for release on Tuesday, 30th May. The next paragraphs highlight some of the updates for this versions.

GCC 4.6

The GNU Compiler Collection has been updated to version 4.6, the list of  changes includes the following new warning that will be visible while compiling packages for openSUSE Factory:

• “New -Wunused-but-set-variable and -Wunused-but-set-parameter warnings were added for C, C++, Objective-C and Objective-C++. These warnings diagnose variables respective parameters which are only set in the code and never otherwise used. Usually such variables are useless and often even the value assigned to them is computed needlessly, sometimes expensively. The -Wunused-but-set-variable warning is enabled by default by -Wall flag and -Wunused-but-set-parameter by -Wall -Wextra flags.”

Some packages have been failing by the new GCC due to new warnings and new optimizations and most have been fixed already but please double check that your packages are building and running fine.

RPM 4.9

Michael Schröder announced RPM 4.9 for Factory. He explains the main packager visible changes as:

“Besides some bug fixes and an update to a newer BerkeleyDB
library rpm-4.9.0 contains plugin architecture for dependency
generation. In older rpms, the internal dependency generator
was pretty much hardcoded in C, so we always used the old
external one to generate dependencies. With rpm-4.9.0, the
internal generator has become flexible enough so that we
can use it.

This means for you, that rpm will no longer use the %__find_provides and %__find_requires macros. Some packages redefined those macros to be able to filter the generated dependencies.
This will no longer work in rpm-4.9.0. Instead, support for
dependency filtering was added to rpm…”

GNOME 3

GNOME 3 has now hit Factory as well and Vincent Untz explained how to fix failures due to the large push.

Linux Kernel 2.6.39

This update was a “boring” update – nothing broke AFAIK ;), so I hope it’s a solid version. Users will benefit from the new features in it. 2.6.39 is the first kernel without the Big Kernel Lock at all!

Packaging Changes

Besides new software, also new ways of handling it get introduced. The following catched my eyes:

Rpmlint update

Ludwig Nussel updated rpmlint to version 1.2 and explained the new warnings about packaging of rpm packages – and what to do about them.

Changing the process of Factory submissions with the Open Build Service

Now with every submission to Factory scripts are run automatically that do two different reviews before the package goes to human check-in review:

• The “legal-auto” review checks the updated package for changes in licenses.
• The “factory-auto” review checks that the updated package builds actually in the devel project – and if not, rejects it.

The “legal-auto” review has quite a long backlog at the moment and Jürgen is working on moving some of the checks to rpmlint or osc checks – so that the packager notices and fixes them before submission to Factory.

Also, you can now submit packages to Factory even if you are not the maintainer of the package but in this case the maintainer (packager) gets a review request to review that the package really can go to factory and thus a plea to packagers to handle their review requests.

openSUSE Conference

The openSUSE Conference is this year co-located with the SUSE Labs conference. Join us to present and discuss also Factory related topics. The Call for papers is open now!

I’m interested on feedback on this article – should I start a series?