Release Notes for Alpine 3.18.0

• python 3.11 https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.11.html
• linux-lts 6.1 https://lkml.org/lkml/2022/12/11/206

• The gnome metapackage was reworked and the packages gnome-apps-extra and gnome-games-collection were removed to avoid opinionated lists in metapackages. It is advised to remove those from /etc/apk/world before performing the upgrade. Additionally, the new subpackage gnome-dev-tools was added following upstream's recommendations.

DT_RELR

on x86, x86_64, and ppc64le, -Wl,-z,pack-relative-relocs is now added to the base LDFLAGS. this reduces elf (executable/shared-library) size by 10% on average.

however, these binaries are now not portable to other musl-based systems that have a musl older than 1.2.4, because older versions are incapable of loading these binaries.

precompiled python bytecode

.pyc is no longer shipped in py3- packages, or for the python3 interpreter. by default, python3-pycompile will automatically install itself with python3, and will compile the bytecode along with any packages you install with a package trigger. if you want to have no bytecode generated, run:

apk add !python3-pycompile

which disables the trigger.

removal of pipewire-media-session

pipewire-media-session was removed, as upstream explicitly recommends to not use it, and it's completely superceded by wireplumber. if you used it, make sure you don't have pipewire-media-session in /etc/apk/world, and configure any scripts you might've had to launch wireplumber instead.