HOW IS OPENSUSE LEAP UPDATED?

English Open Chat
#1

I love OpenSuse. How does this distro update packages? I mean, are the applications in the repo’s updated (besides security fixes) between releases 42.1 and 42.2 ?

Thanks.

#2

No. Not in the standard repos (OSS and Non-OSS). Security fixes (and very important “recommended” fixes) are retrofitted and put into the Update repos. You can install them with

zypper patch

or YaST > Software > Online Update.

This is to keep openSUSE as stable as possible. After all, all those packages were tested together before the openSUSE version was released. When you then would replace packages with newer versions, that integral testing becomes nil.

When you are fond of having newer versions of the different packages for whatever reason, you should look at Tumbleweed.

#3

Thanks Henk;
I Thought that was the case for non rolling releases but did notice the VLC was 2.2.4 (higher than in ubuntu 16.04!) and KDE is now 5.5.5. Would such version changes be only due to security or very important?

#4

I outlined the openSUSE policy as you asked for.

I have no idea about these individual cases because:

  1. I do not run Leap 42.1;
  2. I do not look to version information of packages as long as the products function to my satisfaction;
  3. I have no idea what Ubuntu (or in fact any other distro) has.
#5

There are exceptions for the rule, as bug and security fixes are not always easy to backport.

One case are web browsers like Firefox and Chromium, which don’t do strict security updates any more.

For Plasma, we decided to upgrade to 5.5.5 because of missing features in 5.4 that have been readded, and also because of the huge pile of bug fixes (wouldn’t have been manageable to backport them).

VLC 2.2.4 is a bugfix (and security) only update to the 2.2.1 originally included in Leap 42.1 though.

42.2 is (will be) a completely new release though, so applications may get upgraded to newer feature versions, on the maintainers’ discretion.
E.g. 42.2 will have kernel 4.4 (42.1 has 4.1), Qt 5.6 (42.1 has 5.5), and Plasma 5.8 in the standard repos.

#6

I suspect that your questions are answered by the presentations made by the SUSE staff who are responsible for the openSUSE distribution during the recent openSUSE Conference 2016 – June 22 - 26, here in sunny Franken.

Who are these people?Let’s take a look at the boss: Richard Brown: <https://events.opensuse.org/users/7112>.
And this guy: Max Lin: <https://events.opensuse.org/users/1714>
And finally this guy: Ludwig Nussel: <https://events.opensuse.org/users/710>
They are all employed by SUSE LLC, which is owned by Micro Focus International plc. The headquarters of the SUSE division of Micro Focus is located in Nürnberg, Germany.
The complete 2016 Conference program is available here: <https://events.opensuse.org/conference/oSC16/schedule>

What needs to be understood is, the staging process used by the openSUSE project for the acceptance of packages into the distribution – openQA is the mechanism which gates the acceptance of each package into the distribution’s repositories.
[HR][/HR]Did you notice? SUSE . . . openSUSE – this is a difference which needs to be understood and, it has to do with how the openSUSE project is funded . . .