The legal team has also gone through the long list of new packages and package updates during the legal reviews and reduced this week the list from over 100 packages to 12 packages now. Thanks Ciaran and Christoper for your legal review!

Policy

Detailed changes

Coolo explained the current policy on how detailed the changes entry in packages should be:

I repeat what I said before so everyone is on the same page:

Version numbers are per se no information and we want to offer users an easy, standarized way to find out what changed. But it’s not the packager’s job to collect upstream NEWS. So if the upstream project does not offer a summary, then say so in the .changes file, so also the user knows. If the upstream  project does not provide a summary but a detailed web page, then a link is fine too.

Major Package checkins

Desktops

GNOME saw another step to the stable GNOME 3.2.0 with the GNOME 3.1.4 testing release getting pushed into Factory. KDE’s new release 4.7 is now also in Factory.

So far, the new kontact 2.0 version has not been submitted for Factory and you can get it from the KDE repositories. Btw. the openSUSE KDE developers have made the sqlite backend the default for akonadi since the upstream default of mysql caused too many problems. If you’re running already kmail2 and like to switch follow Ismail’s advice to change in ~/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc the line Driver=QMYSQL to Driver=QSQLITE.

New packages

New packages include quassel (an irc client) clementine (an amarok competitor) shorewall (new firewall). Also amarok was updated to 2.4.3 and thunderbird got updated together with enigmail.

Mounting /usr in the initrd

Michal Marek updated mkinitrd to mount /usr in the initrd. In the past, we had to move quite a lot libraries and binaries from /usr to the root
partition to allow having /usr as separate partition that can be mounted in all supported scenarios, like via nfs. This led to changes in many places and testing that everything worked as well. With mounting from the initrd, we do not need to move binaries and libraries anymore around.

Michal calls for testers on his blog and is also going to enhance the initrd to support all cases. Right now the simple cases work but support for booting from nfs is not supported yet.

Other interesting bits

openSUSE Conference

Please register now for the conference!

Package changes

GNOME 3.1.3

The GNOME team plans to have GNOME 3.2 in for openSUSE 12.1 and thus have updated to the current development release 3.1.3. They have also started removing old GNOME 2 packages that are not needed anymore.

systemd

Frederic gave an update on systemd integration. The graphical bootloader allows now to switch during boot between systemd, SysVinit and also shell code.

Also, Lennart Poettering wrote in his “systemd for developers” series about socket activation where he uses cups as example.

hal

The hal daemon has been dropped from Factory after all users with clean spec files have been changed to work with the successors of hal like udisk and udev.

samba

Samba is getting updated to 3.6.0, one of its major features is full SMB2 support.

Linux Kernel Headers

Linux kernel 2.6.38 removed the Video for Linux v1 support and also the file linux/videodev.h. Since we now use the Linux Kernel 3.0, applications using the old interface need to be converted. A replacement is libv4l1-videodev.h from libv4l-dev >= 0.8.4.

Keeping old kernel(s) while installing new ones

Michal Marek descripes in his blog how it’s possible to configure which kernels to keep installed when a new one gets installed. With a simple change to the zypp configuration, you can define e.g. that you always like to keep the latest running kernel when you install a new one.

Upcoming Features

A new page called “upcoming features” has been created to point out new features for the next release. Please help updating the page with new information.

Policy and tool changes

Directories not owned by a package

We have now enabled a build time check that all directories are owned by a package and this hit 49 packages, most of them are fixed by now but packagers should fix the remaining onw.

Other interesting bits

openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 3

Coolo announced that milestone 3 is delayed due to some kernel bugs which the testing team encountered with their daily testing scripts.  On 2011-07-18 the 3.0 RC7 kernel was checked in and should fix this.

openSUSE Conference

The call for papers is continuing to run, please submit session proposals at the conference site. Also, registration is open now.

Package changes

Linux 3.0

Linux kernel 3.0 rc5 is currently on its way to factory and the header files (in package linux-glibc-devel) have already been updated for it. If your software reads the Linux kernel version, please check that it can cope with the two digits instead of the three of the new version. Best would be to not read the version at all.

Systemd

Frederic has proposed a “Road to systemd for openSUSE 12.1″. Systemd is a replacement of the SysVinit scripts that we have been using and improving in the past with many new – including some controversial – ideas. Check his blog post for additional references about systemd. The majority of the distributions are moving to systemd as well and standarizing on it, will allow to share some more code and development in this area.

We’re now in phase 1 – which means: Get systemd running as an option. Once this is working satisfactory, we can switch the default (phase 2) and decide what to do with SysVinit support.

No static glibc libraries

The C library glibc now does not come anymore with static libraries, those are in the new glibc-devel-static subpackage.

Python 3.2

The python3 package is now at version 3.2, the most important change in Python 3.2 is the implementation of “PEP 384, a stable ABI for extension modules” which means that with 3.2 and upwards there won’t be any API breakages for modules which is really important developer wise.

Another big improvement is the new GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) implementation which will speed up threaded Python code. Python 3.2 also introduces “futures” library which is used for concurrent programming, this will be useful more multi-core Python development.

Tomoyo

Tomoyo is a MAC (Mandatory Access Control) implementation for Linux – so an alternative to AppArmor and SELinux. openSUSE’s Linux kernel does now come with the module and also the tools were updated to support this.

Policy and tool changes

New Source Service mode activated and recompression of tar balls

The new source service mode has been activated, it is recommended to update to osc 0.132 version as available in the openSUSE:Tools project to work with source services. Now the download URL given in source link is checked, so it has to be accurate. If you downloaded and recompressed a tarball, read Coolo’s policy change: “please don’t recompress tarballs unless it saves >1MB for download.”.

He also mentions:

What will become policy sooner or later is that you should not have incorrect source URLs behind Source*, so _if_ you have to recompress, don’t lie in the
Source line, but put the original tar as comment and use local file names in Source:

Dropping a package from Factory

Vincent explained  How/why/when to drop a package from Factory.

Release notes in FATE

To make it easier to write release notes, it helps a lot, if you (= the so-called stakeholders) would provide a release notes snippet in the future using openFATE. We can then collect all those release notes and edit them.

Other interesting bits

openSUSE Conference

The call for papers is continuing to run, please submit session proposals at the conference site. If you like to learn what a BoF is, read this article.

GNU C Library (glibc) 2.13

We’ve updated glibc from version 2.11 to 2.13 which brings many bug fixes and AFAIK no major breakages to packages. The package itself got cleaned up a little bit as well, so please report any problems.

GO Programming Language

Factory now contains a compiler for the GO language which is “is an expressive, concurrent, garbage collected systems programming language that is type safe and memory safe.”. More details about GO are available on the openSUSE Wiki, the devel project with additional packages is devel:languages:go.

Packaging: Source Processing

The usage of _service files in Factory confused many packagers and resulted in broken packages so that these will be deprecated. As a replacement, Adrian implemented now a new source processing method and asks for testers.

Packaging: Adding useful Provides to cups drivers

Vincent “updated python-cups to a new version, and it is now shipping
files to automatically add Provides tag to packages that are shipping
cups drivers.”. This allows desktop packages to install the right printer driver – or users to do it via zypper. Packages with cups drivers just need to add a “BuildRequires: python-cups”.

Open Build Service Improvement

The “My Work” view has been updated to better show packages that are in review state and need your review. I suggest everybody to check out the page and cleanup your list.

Multiple Buildroots with osc

If you like to use more than one build at the same time, there are several options like pointed out on the opensuse-packaging mailing list:

• Use of the environment variable OSC_BUILD_ROOT to define a build root.
• Editing of the osc config file ~/.oscrc and setting build-root to contain the variables %(repo), %(arch),  %(project) or %(package).

Correction on auto-legal build service check

Jürgen corrected my report from last week: He would love to see the checks for auto-legal moved and welcomes any help.

Thanks

Thanks for the words of encouragement to my first blog post. I’ll try to continue this series. If there’s anything you think should be added to it, please contact me via email at aj at opensuse dot org.

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?

As Coolo said in on the project list,  we’d like to make a small change to the numbering:

We will not have a .0 release but only .1, .2, .3 release. Since we have releases in three months, the November
release is always the .1 release, the July release the .2 and the March release the .3.

So, the plan is that the next release will be called openSUSE 12.1 and launched on the 10th of November, 2011! Two years later – on the 14th of November, 2013 – we will then have the openSUSE 13.1 release.

So, the next four releases are called:

• November 2011: openSUSE 12.1
• July 2012: openSUSE 12.2
• March 2013: openSUSE 12.3
• November 2013: openSUSE 13.1

Detailed results for logged-in openSUSE members are available at the connect poll page and I have reproduced them here as well:

• A: “old school”: Like currently but only counting the right number until 3:
  55% (54 votes)
• B: “Fedora style”: Just integers:
  29 % (28 votes)
• C: “Ubuntu style”: YY.MM:
  16 % (16 votes)

This is also consistent with the results of the first public voting.

Note that openSUSE does not have a major and minor numbering, even if it seems so. There is right now no difference in any way between what we would do for openSUSE 11.4 or 12.0 or 12.1 – and no sense to speak about openSUSE 11 or openSUSE 11 family. We also had in the past no process on how to name the next release (when to increase which parts of the number).

I think this new versioning is still consistent with the old one but also an improvement since it’s now clear that we change the first digit every two year. The first poll showed that half of our users prefer a date based versioning and the other a consecutive numbering. So, depending on your point of view, you can see this as a mixture of both or as consecutive numbering

So, time now to make openSUSE 12.1 a great release!

The openSUSE members only poll is now live on connect.opensuse.org until April 04, 2011. Please select your favorite option!

This is the first iteration. Coolo and myself discussed to use a second survey with the group of winners on connect.opensuse.org.

openSUSE does not have a major and minor numbering, even if it seems so. There is right now no difference in any way between what we would do for openSUSE 11.4 or 12.0 – and no sense to speak about openSUSE 11 or openSUSE 11 family. We also have no process on how to name the next release (when to increase which parts of the number).

Here are some options, if I miss some, please tell me and I will then soon setup a poll. I’m listening the next version we would use as well as how the following would be called as an example. Remember we have releases every 8 months, so the next releases will be in:
November 2011, July 2012, March 2013, November 2013, July 2014, March 2015.

Here are the options I collected so far:

1. “Old school”: The same we do right now but let’s decide when tochange the right number: we count it always until 3.
   Next release is 12.0.
   Following releases: 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 13.0
2. “Fedora style”: Just integers.
   Next release is: 12
   Following release: 13, 14, 15
3. “Mandriva style”: YYYY.counter (4 digit year, counter starts a 0)
   Next release is: 2011.1
   Following releases: 2012.0, 2013.0, 2013.1, 2014.0, 2015.1
4. “Old school /Mandriva variation”: YY.counter (2 digit year, counter starts at zero)
   Next release is: 11.5 (otherwise this won’t work)
   Following releases: 12.0, 13.0, 13.1, 14.0, 15.1
5. “Ubuntu style”: YY.MM (2 digit year, 2 digit month)
   Next release is: 11.11
   Following releases: 12.07, 13.03, 13.11, 14.07, 15.03
6. “Ubuntu style variation”: YYYY-MM (4 digit year, 2 digit month)
   Next release is: 2011-11
   Following releases are: 2012-07, 2013-03, 2013-11, 2014-07, 2015-03
7. “octal”: Coolo came up with calling the next release “o 12” and then proposed to go octal (so 012). We decided to start with 012 even if that 10 in decimal.
   Next release is: 012
   Following releases: 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 020
8. “Seasons”: “Season YYYY” since March is in spring, July in summer, and November is in autumn.
   Next release is: Autumn 2011
   Following releases: Summer 2012, Spring 2013, Autumn 2013, Summer 2014

During the last rounds of discussions about the versioning scheme, the following wishes have been distilled:

• It must be clear which release is newer
• It must be clear how to the next release is called, we need an easy algorithm

Coolo suggested to do the poll in two rounds: first list all – even obscure – options that have been proposed and in the next round only include those that got
more than 80% of the winner.  Of course if there is only one, the second round can be removed. The first round you would be able to tick every option you like, the second one only tick your favorite.

I’m collecting proposals now until end of Monday, 14th of March.

I hope some days of vacation will be in there as well so that I can be refreshed again when I return back to the Novell office to continue working for openSUSE.

Right now, I try to find some people that take over some of my responsibilities.

I will take care that everything I do which is important will be handled during the time, e.g. even better reaction to PromoDVD shipping – and silently hope that after the parental everything works far better without me than right now

So, you all have a short break from me.  I don’t know how much time I’ll spend online but I know I will not be in the office and don’t want to be fully engaged during my leave.  I’m looking forward to both
the parental leave and also to return – and will read regularly the openSUSE planet to see what’s happening!

During my absence, Jacqueline Junghanns will take over and handle most of my responsibilities. Some of you might know Jacqueline from the openSUSE conferences which she helped to organize. I hand over the virtual mikrophone to Jacqueline to introduce herself:

Jacqueline

Jacqueline

“Hi, my name is Jacqueline Junghanns and I can say that I am a SUSE dinosaur as I had my ten year anniversary just a couple of weeks ago and I do not plan to extinct any time soon ;).  I am very much looking forward to dive into the openSUSE project because I already got the chance to help out “backstage” and I am glad about this new opportunity.  During my ten years I gathered experience in various areas such as hardware certification and right now as a team assistant for OPS.”

Sending of PromoDVDs

One thing I have handled in the past, is sending out of PromoDVDs and other promotional material for events. We do have a good stock of openSUSE 11.3 DVDs available and happily send them out for events. Please start using the address promodvds@opensuse.org to request them – and right now Jacqueline and myself will answer, later only Jacqueline.