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-variableand-Wunused-but-set-parameterwarnings 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-variablewarning is enabled by default by-Wallflag and-Wunused-but-set-parameterby-Wall -Wextraflags.”
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?
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
There are some bugs in openSUSE 11.4 that there were not in openSUSE 11.3.
An annoying beep on shut down. The sound doesn’t work properly (VLC video’s sound mutes when you pause it, see another window and play again the video. (These bugs don’t happen with openSUSE 11.3, Mint and Ubuntu, both 10.10 and 11.04).
I hope they will be fix in openSUSE 12.1.
Did you file bug reports for those?
No, I didn’t. But I found bug reports about those. I’ll do if i find this bugs on 12.1
I’m sorry. I know that isn’t the place for file bu reports.
Let’s working on this amazing distro!
I hope (and I will work for this) 12.1 will be awesome.
Hey Andreas,
thank you very much for this article. The point with the two different auto checks in factory was new for me. I thought that a human declines my sr with a legal issue 😉
Thanks.
Greetings Sascha
Biggest problem of openSUSE is package management. Large amount or users incl. me, experiencing very, very slow refresh of repositories and download speed(a few bites/s), no matter which mirror i set up in repos it’s unusable and that is a major showstoper for many potential users…
Google “opensuse very slow update”
@6205: hmmm. I haven’t configured any mirror by hand as mirrorbrain should do that automatically – see http://omgsuse.com/content/sharing-opensuse-world-mirrorbrain 😉
Maybe not picking a mirror by hand will be helpful? The many improvements in zypper to speed up download of repository updates and packages should really make it faster than anything out there, and be able to fill your network pipeline to the max… It does do that here for most packages…
I’ve googled for it and the newest entry was from 2008. I agree with Jos, use mirrorbrain…
I’m a bit sorry to disagree, but from download.opensuse.org I get at least 1.2Mb/sec (the most my line supports at home).
I absolutely love this. If you can continue writing this, it will be nice. This will thus also be part of the weekly news. Thanks for this.
One thing I noticed is that the bug for those using pppoe still exist in this new version. I know this bug will be fixed and should be fixed before 12.1 is released. I hope that with this release they look at fixing bugs and not passing them along to the next release. I guess some bugs were not in 11.3 but in 11.4. I just hope that this release is the best yet and stays in beta long enough to test all the bugs and get rid of them before it is released.