Rolling Development Still needs Testing, Promoters

Since changing to a rolling development version model for the eventual release of openSUSE Leap 42.3, challenges have arisen to get more people testing it.

There is no milestone releases (Alpha or Beta) for openSUSE Leap 42.3, but snapshots of the development version are constantly being released.

“So far I have not seen too many 42.3 bugs,” said Leap Release Manager Luwdig Nussel in his talk at the openSUSE Conference. “I don’t think we are bug free, so I think it just is not tested enough.”

Some Linux users might find a rolling development process for a Linux release to be less appealing for testing, but testing is certainly necessary before the actual release Leap 42.3 at the end of July.

The next minor version of Leap 42.3 is mostly a refresh and hardware enablement release that will have more than 10,000 packages. While the development version of Leap 42.3 it is still considerably stable because it is extremely hardened and shares sources from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12, the release could still use more testing and people willing to promote openSUSE’s next minor 42 series version.

Nussel said SLE 12 Service Pack 3 (SP3) and Leap 42.3 are developed in parallel to one another and both benefit from mutual bug reports.

The SLE 12 SP3 Release Candidate is projected to be released soon, so the next snapshot released after Build0267 for Leap 42.3’s development version can be considered a Release Candidate. Build0267 has many of the SLE Sources, but more will arrive post Build0267.

Leap 42.3 builds have been coming out on a regular basis with new community packages being updated in the newest builds, which are automatically released once they pass openQA testing. Testers are encouraged to test the development version and can download the iso image on software.opensuse.org. After installing Leap, testers can enter the terminal and enter zypper update for the newest Leap 42.3 snapshot and packages.

Don’t forget to report bugs if you find one.

To view Nussels talk about Leap 42.3, visit the openSUSETV Channel on YouTube.