Another week has passed and there have been many changes with Cauldron as well as continued testing on RC ISOs for Mageia 6. Mageia 5 has also received some important updates.
Cauldron
As we are hoping to release the release candidate for Mageia 6 soon, the focus on development in Cauldron is switching more and more away from new releases and features to focus on bug fixes and getting the packaged software into the best state for release. That being said, there was a major update to Gnome 3.24. This is currently in updates_testing to check was major issues and regressions before being pushing to release if everything is ok.
Another big update was to move to ICU 58.2, which is a requirement for packaging Firefox 52 ESR. The rebuilds went relatively well in core/updates_testing, but after the rebuilt packages were moved to core/release, some issues appeared with Cauldron. Ironically, all Mozilla software (Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey/Iceape) crashed with this new version, forcing us to rebuild them against their bundled ICU code base. We could finally fix the crashes with the system library by adding Mozilla patches to ICU 58.2, which should hopefully allow us to package all Mozilla software against the system ICU.
There were updates to LibreOffice (5.3.2 RC1) which will be updated to final before Mageia 6 is released. The libinput RC update from last week was also updated to final. Samba was updated to 4.5.7, fixing this Mageia bug and a security issue where a symlink race could be used to gain access to parts of the filesystem not shared, see this CVE for further details. DNF was updated to 2.1.1, Mesa to 17.0.2 and flash player plugin was also updated to 25.0.0.127. Firefox/Thunderbird are currently on versions 45.8.0 ESR, with the intention to update them to the 52 ESR branch for the final release.
ISO testing for Mageia 6 RC started last week, and a new round of ISOs was built yesterday. Testing so far is looking good.
Mageia 5
There have been lots of updates submitted for validation, here is the full list, the highlights of which are:
- Flash – 25.0.0.127 – multiple CVE fixes
- Kernel 4.4.55
- qbittorrent 3.3.11
- Firefox/Thunderbird 45.8.0, this closes MGASA 2017-0081 and 0082 respectively.
Community
The introduction of packager groups for various programming languages was discussed last week, and acted upon yesterday. As a first step, groups were created for thePerl, Python, Java and PHP stacks. If you’d like to help with the debugging and packaging of those stacks, don’t hesitate to join them. More information is available here.
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I feel like i am really contributing 😀
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I will be cheering you on. While others rave on about Linux Mint, Ubuntu and other distros, Mageia always has a special place in my heart, since the days of Mandrake Linux and then Mandriva Linux.
Though not a high priority, I hope the devs can spruce up the aesthetics before the final release: wallpapers, sound schemes etc.
The sound scheme is highly likely to be a no, unless you happen to have one lying around and wouldn’t mind implementing it for us 🙂
With the artwork, what would you like spruced up with it?
As I user of both Mint & Mageia, I see certain strengths & weaknesses in both distros. I greatly prefer the stance of Mageia towards security & the MSEC security tool for instance. Unfortunately with with many Mageia tools I get a sense that I would have to to a fair amount of digging around to get a better sense of my options, while with Mint things are more clear & easy.
One security related example might be the way the firewall is set up. I think a simple check box at the top of the options that said something like ‘Block all incoming (full firewall)’ would make the way the firewall functions more intuitive. The way the rest of the options are set up make the Mageia firewall more powerful & flexible than Gufw seems to be for average users, so I think the tool in Mageia would be the better option if it were more clear. Of course everything was perfectly clear once I ran into the wiki article describing the firewall settings, but it isn’t as instantly intuitive as Gufw even though I think it is better overall.
Another example of this is how easy & intuitive it is to select the fastest mirror to download new packages & updates in Mint. The equivalent tool in the Mageia Control Center is perfectly usable, but it isn’t as simple or intuitive as the one in Mint. Similar things could be said for the Mint Software Center vs rpmdrake which is more like Synaptic in comparison. That being said, I do find rpmdrake to be more robust & flexible, while with Mint Software Center I often fall back to Synaptic. Also handling outside software is a lot easier in Mint.
Anyway I do find lots of little things that make Mint easier from an average users perspective, & would like to see Mageia aim to be as easy while retaining the greater flexibility & power that many of it’s tools provide. Judging from the marketing on the installer slides in Mageia 6, it seems Mageia has some hopes to get the same kind of typical PC users that Mint is so well targeted at. If that’s true it would be well worth looking at Mint & trying to beat them at their own game. A little friendly competition can bring out the best in everyone.
Whatever you do, I’m still looking forward to Mageia 6, & thinks for the update.
Something like this will be more likely to get to the right people and the appropriate attention on the dev ml. See ml.mageia.org for full details.
Still, always great to hear feedback and have the community engaged!
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Hi Donald.
First, sorry for my English.
I like many things in Mageia.
The package pgadmin3 is outdated (version 3.18) in Mageia 5, even in Cauldron.
Version 1.22 was submitted back in March 2016 with an update on the 18th of Feb, is there a reason you need the fully updated version? It looks like both 1.22 and 1.18 are both still supported on the pgadmin website. So, the best place to ask for this is on the bugzilla, either as an update request on Cauldron or as a backport for 5.