Fwd: [opensuse-factory] Tumbleweed, Factory merge - FAQ's

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-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: [opensuse-factory] Tumbleweed, Factory merge - FAQ’s
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 11:57:48 +0200
From: Richard Brown <...@opensuse.org>
To: oS-fctry <opensuse-factory@opensuse.org>

Hi all,

As you might have seen on the announcement on news.opensuse.org and
opensuse-announce [1], we’re planning on merging the Tumbleweed and
Factory rolling releases. I wanted to start this thread here so people
can ask questions, and to answer a few questions I expect will be on
everyone’s mind

  1. What does this mean for Contributors? Will I have to do anything
    different to get my packages into the openSUSE rolling and regular
    distributions?

A. No - ‘Factory’ remains the name of the ‘devel project’ for the
openSUSE rolling release. The process of Submit requests, Staging, etc,
should all remain the same. Regular releases will be split off from
Factory in the same way they are now. The only change is that the
published, tested, completed, ready repositories and ISO’s we currently
call the ‘Factory rolling release’ will now be called ‘Tumbleweed’

  1. What does this mean for existing Factory users? Do I need to do
    anything?

A. Yes and No - When this goes live on Nov. 4 it is our intention to
‘alias’ the current Factory repositories to the ‘new’ Tumbleweed
repositories. So existing Factory users should not need to do
anything, however it will be recommended that people change their
repositories to point to the new ones as we will phase out the current
Factory URL’s in about 6 months. We’ll be sending out how-to guides and
reminders close to the Nov 4. launch of ‘merged Tumbleweed’ and the
retirement of the ‘old Factory repositories’ in 6 months time.

  1. What does this mean for existing Tumbleweed users? Do I need to do
    anything?

A. If you want to continue using a rolling release, then Yes. Your
repositories will need to be changed to the new ones. Guides will be
published before Nov. 4 on how to manually do this, and we are
investigating creating some kind of ‘migration package’ to change them
automatically.

  1. Why are we doing this?

A. With the vast improvements to the Factory development process over
the last 2 years, we effectively found ourselves as a project with not
one, but two rolling release distributions in addition to our main
regular release distribution. GregKH signalled his intention to stop
maintaining Tumbleweed as a ‘rolling-released based on the current
release’. It seemed a natural decision then to bring both the Factory
rolling release and Tumbleweed rolling release together, so we can
consolidate our efforts and make openSUSE’s single rolling release as
stable and effective as possible.

The decision to name this single rolling release Tumbleweed is because
many of the people I spoke to feel it’s a more suitable name for a
user-ready rolling release. ‘Factory’ paints pictures of smoke stacks
and half finished products, when in reality our rolling release is only
published when it’s ready. It’s stable and a great choice for anyone who
wants to develop on Linux and the latest software stacks or contribute
to openSUSE.

  1. What about OBS Projects that build against openSUSE_Tumbleweed and/or
    openSUSE_Factory?

A. We won’t be making any changes to anyone’s OBS Projects. OBS Projects
which build against openSUSE_Tumbleweed will automatically be
effectively built against the ‘new’ Tumbleweed when it goes live.
Projects building openSUSE_Factory/standard will continue to build
against the ‘unpublished’ ‘work in progress’ Factory project, which can
still be a valid use case, so nothing will change there.
Projects building against openSUSE_Factory/snapshot will effectively be
building against the same as openSUSE_Tumbleweed, so it would be
advisable to not build against both, but we wont be automatically
changing anything in OBS.

I’m sure there will be other questions and discussion, please reply
below!

[1]https://news.opensuse.org/2014/10/24/tumbleweed-factory-rolling-releases-to-merge/

–
Richard Brown
openSUSE Chairman

–
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2

I see this as a good move.

3

hi…

where can I find latest .ISO’s of **FACTORY **???

these r outdated : http://download.opensuse.org./factory/iso/

tia…

4

On 2014-10-24 16:56, goro goren wrote:
>
> hi…
>
> where can I find latest .ISO’s of *FACTORY *???
>
> these r outdated : http://download.opensuse.org./factory/iso/

Why don’t you ask that on a separate thread? I don’t see the relation to
the tumbleeweed-factory merge. :-?

However, if there are not there, they don’t exist. Something is
withholding them.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)

5

Those are the latest.

If you want something more recent, you will have to download from the OpenQA site. I downloaded one of those a few days ago. Then I attempted an install. The install failed.

Until the solve the failures that are showing on OpenQA, expect factory releases and updates to be stalled.

6

This is why normal users can’t figure out what Factory and Tumbleweed are with respect to openSUSE.

We were told Factory worked a certain way, but nothing is working as described right now.

7

Factory is working as described. Currently, it is stalled because tests on OpenQA are showing problems. But that is part of the description of how factory works (and how Tumbleweed will work after Nov 4).

8

On 2014-10-26 18:36, nrickert wrote:
>
> xorbe;2671336 Wrote:
>> We were told Factory worked a certain way, but nothing is working as
>> described right now.
>
> Factory is working as described. Currently, it is stalled because tests
> on OpenQA are showing problems. But that is part of the description of
> how factory works (and how Tumbleweed will work after Nov 4).

Exactly.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)

9

I use Tumbleweed day to day, it’s not thrown a clot since as long as I can remember. I assume that would be down to the vigilance of GK-H. I hope the switch to Factory direct stays pretty stable, in the style of the old Tumbleweed.

10

Absolutely. Except that squeezing of kernel 17.1 into Tumbleweed, with its bug for disabling and corrupting a btrfs root partition among others, during its last days throws just a bit of a clot. After all, 13.2 defaults to btrfs and we had passed RC1 release (IIRC).

I hope the switch to Factory direct stays pretty stable, in the style of the old Tumbleweed.

Me also hopes. Technically it’s a merge not a switch, and we will not be using the development Factory directly. The “extraction” of new Tumbleweed will have had automated testing to remove catastrophic bugs, but will lose some pre-testing by human being (aka GK-H). :wink:

11

I think it will.

I’ve been using factory since June, on my main desktop. The breakages have been minor and no worse than occasional breakages on Tumbleweed.

I’ll personally revert to using 13.2 on my desktop, at least for a while. That’s what most users will do, so it is better to share the experience of others. But I’ll have factory (renamed as “Tumbleweed”) on my test box. And maybe I’ll put it back on my Desktop after a few months.

12

On Sat, 01 Nov 2014 13:36:01 GMT
nrickert <nrickert@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:

>
> swerdna;2672177 Wrote:
> > I hope the switch to Factory direct stays pretty stable, in the
> > style of the old Tumbleweed.
>
> I think it will.
>
> I’ve been using factory since June, on my main desktop. The breakages
> have been minor and no worse than occasional breakages on Tumbleweed.

The main problems I’ve had with 13.2 are with installation and
upgrading of KDE. The former shouldn’t occur with Tumbleweed and KDE
“improvements” often cause me trouble whether they’re on a factory
system or a “stable” system.

>
> I’ll personally revert to using 13.2 on my desktop, at least for a
> while. That’s what most users will do, so it is better to share the
> experience of others. But I’ll have factory (renamed as “Tumbleweed”)
> on my test box. And maybe I’ll put it back on my Desktop after a few
> months.
>

I have at least three “/” partitions on each of my machines, one for
“stable”, one for “factory” and one floating which is usually for the
previous “stable” system whilst the new one is bedding in. Not sure yet
how I’ll use them in future but possibly “Stable”, “Tumbleweed”, and
one for testing various odds and sods. The latter will still be needed
for checking whether there’s any bugs in future installation DVDs.

–
Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks.
openSUSE 13.2-RC1 (64-bit); KDE 4.14.2; AMD Phenom II X2 550 Processor;
Kernel: 3.17.1; Video: nVidia GeForce 210 (using nouveau driver);
Sound: ATI SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)

13

That’s what I have been moving toward. I actually use an encrypted LVM, so I am putting three root volumes there (root1, root2, root3) as well as home and swap.

One of those roots will be for the stable release, the others for testing. But factory (oops, make that “Tumbleweed”) will be a big part of the testing.

I had to do some repartitioning anyway, because my “/boot” partitions were too small with the multi-kernel stuff and Plymouth.

My main desktop is currently running factory with an alternate hard drive. I’ll complete the reorganization of my main hard drive after I have downloaded the 13.2 GA release.

14

Graham P Davis wrote:

> The main problems I’ve had with 13.2 are with installation and
> upgrading of KDE. The former shouldn’t occur with Tumbleweed and KDE
> “improvements” often cause me trouble whether they’re on a factory
> system or a “stable” system.
>

Looking back, virtually all of my gripes have been with the installation -
once I get past the PITA issues 13.2 has been pretty painless.

Actually, even the install problems have been mostly with networking.
Unless I’ve really missed something obvious, the lack of configuration
access during installation (setting up hostname, defining network addresses,
getting wired/wireless mixes working, things like that) will be an on-going
issue supporting a load of laptops used at a couple of organizations where I
do volunteer IT work. I still haven’t figured out a way to get some laptops
setup to use wireless during installation with a wired port in place but no
wired connection.

–
Will Honea

15

On Sat, 01 Nov 2014 16:53:51 GMT
Will Honea <whonea@whonea.net> wrote:

> Graham P Davis wrote:
>
> > The main problems I’ve had with 13.2 are with installation and
> > upgrading of KDE. The former shouldn’t occur with Tumbleweed and KDE
> > “improvements” often cause me trouble whether they’re on a factory
> > system or a “stable” system.
> >
>
> Looking back, virtually all of my gripes have been with the
> installation - once I get past the PITA issues 13.2 has been pretty
> painless.

The main installation problem was with Radeon graphics which has been
“fixed” with a kernel update (from 3.16.3 to 3.16.4). Still think
there’s an underlying weakness there though which means it could return

  • again.

>
> Actually, even the install problems have been mostly with
> networking. Unless I’ve really missed something obvious, the lack of
> configuration access during installation (setting up hostname,
> defining network addresses, getting wired/wireless mixes working,
> things like that) will be an on-going issue supporting a load of
> laptops used at a couple of organizations where I do volunteer IT
> work. I still haven’t figured out a way to get some laptops setup to
> use wireless during installation with a wired port in place but no
> wired connection.
>

Yes, I’d forgotten the hassle I’ve had with wireless connections caused
by the replacement of ifup with Wicked. I still haven’t found any way to
use Wicked to connect wirelessly and have to use NetworkManager with the
password kept in the KDE wallet. I had to remove the master password
for the wallet in order to get connected immediately after logon. Not
sure that’s a particularly safe practice.

–
Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks.
openSUSE 13.2-RC1 (64-bit); KDE 4.14.2; AMD Phenom II X2 550 Processor;
Kernel: 3.17.1; Video: nVidia GeForce 210 (using nouveau driver);
Sound: ATI SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)

16

The NET installer is currently broken for installing over WiFi. However, the DVD installer for factory now works over WiFi. So adding online repos should work.

17

nrickert wrote:

> The NET installer is currently broken for installing over WiFi.
> However, the DVD installer for factory now works over WiFi. So adding
> online repos should work.
>

What causes me the most grief is the amount of configuration tuning I have
to do AFTER the installation is done since a successful installation that
creates the script can’t do the complete job on the next machines. The 13.2
RC1 from DVD went cleanly IF I had a wired connection but then I had to do
the re-configuration (especially on laptops) on each individual machine.
For 13.1 and prior (pack to roughly 10.0) once I had a clean install script
all I had to do was change the station-specific info (static IP’s, preferred
SSID, etc) in a text editor, start the DVD install and walk away.

–
Will Honea

18

On Sat, 01 Nov 2014 18:16:01 GMT
nrickert <nrickert@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:

>
> whonea;2672262 Wrote:
> > I still haven’t figured out a way to get some laptops
> > setup to use wireless during installation with a wired port in
> > place but no
> > wired connection.
>
> The NET installer is currently broken for installing over WiFi.
> However, the DVD installer for factory now works over WiFi. So adding
> online repos should work.
>

How long has it worked for you? Has it only just started working with
the last release?
http://download.opensuse.org/factory/iso/openSUSE-Factory-DVD-x86_64-Snapshot20141029-Media.iso
Wireless with Wicked has worked for some people but not others so I’d
like to know whether it’s worth me bothering to try this latest DVD iso.

–
Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks.
openSUSE 13.2-RC1 (64-bit); KDE 4.14.2; AMD Phenom II X2 550 Processor;
Kernel: 3.17.1; Video: nVidia GeForce 210 (using nouveau driver);
Sound: ATI SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)

19

My most recent laptop install was with factory 20141011. The WiFi configuration worked for that. During the install, I used CTRL-ALT-F2 to get a root command prompt, and “ifconfig -a” showed that wireless was connected (had an IP).

I did not try enabling on-line repos for the install.

My most recent try with the NET installer was for 13.2 build 0037. The NET install session failed to configure the WiFi connection, so I abandoned any attempt to install.

As far as I know, 13.2 final is build 0038, and still has the same NET installer problem. But I have not tested that.

20

Hmm… I have 13.2 snapshot 32 downloaded – but – well after the last ten posts from you guys I’ve decided not to even install 13.2 this time, I’ll just keep right on cruising with Tumbleweed for the time being. Right at the moment I don’t have time for multiple installs and enjoying the excitement of a new release (business calls and must be answered). So this will be my first time cruising through the new “release” on pure Tumbleweed. Interesting, looking forward to it.