Hey everyone,

During the last couple hackfests @DataDrake and I did on the OpenSSL upgrade, I indicated that it was likely we were to defer sync until the next week after landing to ensure a sufficient amount of testing was performed. This is standard practice for us, I do it for every single GNOME Stack upgrade, we sometimes do it for kernels or Mesa, etc. and it's what ensures you're always getting fresh goodies while avoiding a lot of pitfalls that other major operating systems have when it comes to major upgrades or designating an entire OS release for it.

The OpenSSL upgrade landed and was completed on the 20th/21st and there has been zero reported issues regarding this upgrade. While this is fantastic news and I don't anticipate any issues to suddenly crop up, the additional time has provided us more leeway in performing larger software stack upgrades and we're taking advantage of it.

So to play it safe and allow us to provide you even more goodies, I'm going to be deferring the sync of packages to the stable repo until the 3rd of July. We'll have a blog post out detailing all the goodies once they've landed in unstable and we're just in the "misc. package updates and fixes" stage, since I'd prefer to write it up once all the desired work is completed rather than write about work that is likely to happen but isn't yet to have occurred.

So far:

  1. OpenSSL has been upgraded, which was ~200 package rebuilds or updates.
  2. libboost has been upgraded by @kyrios, which is ~50 package rebuilds or updates (some overlap with OpenSSL).
  3. Countless package updates from the community.
  4. I've been going through an dealing with some pretty old packages, patching some, doing the usual updates thanks to some update checking tooling we have. That's about ~100 or so updated or patched as well.

Upcoming:

  1. I'll be finishing up a local upgrade of Ruby to 2.7.1 today and pushing that once I've validated Vagrant. This is ~60 packages, some overlap.
  2. @Girtablulu will be performing an upgrade of poppler (a rendering library). Another ~30 packages.
  3. @Girtablulu will also be upgrading Qt5 and doing Plasma + KDE. This is something like ~600 packages.
  4. @DataDrake should be finishing up haskell stack upgrade locally and pushing that hopefully this week or early next week. This is something like ~300 packages.

So as you can tell, we've only hit the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what we have planned just for this forthcoming sync alone. It's all hands on deck when it comes testing and updates. Next week's sync will be another record breaking one, with at least 1400 package updates (some of these are just rebuilds, mind you, and not all of them are actually installed on your system) not including any supplemental patches from the community this week and next.

    Great news!!! Are you planning on updating the ISO any time soon?

      MOOP ETAs aren't really our thing. That being said, we are aware that the overall package update size post-install is considerable, there are just other release blockers that we want to get addressed first (see Budgie and usysconf).

          🙂 I have strong faith in the Solus team; so far, they have never let me down where updates are concerned.

          So, I do not mind waiting another week to acquiring those goodies!

          i watched you at the last hackfest for a few hours you are doing a really good job even if i don't know much about Open SSL, you could see how much heart and soul you put into the object, thank you very much

          I know you don't give dates for releases/updates etc. but I have a question, how do you decide when a kernel upgrade is good? Like when will you push kernel 5.7 into Solus stable? How do you decide if it's good enough? Just asking because there is one improvement with I need but I don't want to install anything unstable on one of my prod systems and I'm wondering how long will I wait for it, like 2 months 3 month? That kind of answer would be really helpful.

            WhiteWolf
            History has shown that moving from one major release to another such as 5.6.x to 5.7.x tends to be minefield of network driver issues and the worst one I remember, file system corruption bugs. So it is whenever they feel confident in the branches stability.

            It will not come this week that much is for sure. Unless there is a reason not to I would assume DataDrake would give it a shot next week given that 5.6.x has reached EOL now with 5.6.19. An pretty sure he mentioned on stream today he did not want to upgrade kernels this week given the amount big changes pending for this week's sync already: https://getsol.us/2020/07/01/usysconf-rewrite-and-major-upgrades-roundup-16/

              How do you decide when it becomes a new point release for Solus? It seems like other distributions would have a point release for a third of the upgrades and fixes that the Solus team will be implementing in the next sync.

              Thank you for all the hard work, it is much appreciated!

                just updated
                everything seems to work just fine
                thanks for another eventless (for the user) upgrade 🙂

                Just updated. Everything works perfectly. Thanks guys. 😃 😄