Release Notes for Alpine 3.16.0

Important changes

Python 2 has been removed

Stable alpine releases do not have python 2 anymore.

/tmp mounted as tmpfs

Previously /tmp was part of the root filesystem and was cleaned on boot via the bootmisc openrc service script. In v3.16, new installations will mount /tmp as tmpfs.

ICU data split

The icu package has been split into:

icu-data-en (2.6 MiB) - Stripped down ICU data with only en_US/GB locale and no legacy charset converters.
icu-data-full (29 MiB) - Full ICU data.

icu-libs only installs icu-data-en. If additional language support is required, icu-data-full needs to be installed manually.

nodejs is now compiled with system ICU.

NetworkManager plugins

NetworkManager plugins (e.g. WiFi or ADSL support) have been moved into subpackages and are not installed by default. If you use some of them, install the corresponding packages:

xen-qemu split

The qemu components of xen were split into a new subpackage, xen-qemu. If you were using the qemu- xen binaries or the xenqemu service or firmware such as qemu/bios.bin / edk2-* files, you might need to install this.

Nextcloud 24

Nextcloud can only be upgraded one major version at a time. However, in Alpine 3.15 the version was 22, and in 3.16 it is 24. To upgrade between them, make use of the nextcloud23 package to satisfy this limitation.

New features and noteworthy new packages

Fixed not showing boot output using consoles with drivers compiled as modules

OpenRC output is now shown on VirtIO serial consoles.

SDL 1.2 migrated to SDL 1.2 compat

The old sdl package (SDL 1.2) has been moved from community to testing and as such won't be part of Alpine 3.16. Applications that use sdl instead use sdl12-compat, which is based on the much more well-maintained sdl2 (SDL 2.0). This results in various improvements such as support for Wayland, PipeWire, and more gamepads.

utmp

TODO(jirutka): Write something…

https://skarnet.org/software/utmps/

The following packages are built with utmps:

busybox
dropbear
mingetty
openssh
util-linux

login-utils

util-linux-login has been added as a provider of the login command. If cmd:login has been added to world, then the util-linux implementation will be preferred over the shadow implementation. If the shadow implementation is required, then shadow-login must be manually selected.

Zsh - modular zshrc and plugins support

TODO(jirutka): Write description.

doas-sudo-shim

If you are hesitant to switch to doas because you have sudo too deep in your muscle memory, hesitant no more! Just install doas-sudo-shim and you can continue to use the sudo command, but without its security issues and bloat.

Significant updates

GNOME 42
LLVM 13
PHP 8.0 and 8.1 both shipped
Python 3.10
QEMU 7
R 4.2
Ruby 3.1
Rust 1.60
Sway 1.7
Xen 4.16.1

KDE

Plasma has been upgraded from 5.23 to 5.24.

KDE applications (the release service) have been upgraded from 21.08 to 22.04 and KDE Frameworks have been upgraded from 5.88 to 5.93.

Plasma Mobile Gear have been upgraded from 21.12 to 22.04.

Python upgraded to 3.10

Python has been upgraded to version 3.10, and all modules have been rebuilt against python 3.10. Manually-installed Python modules must be recompiled against 3.10.

Deprecations / Removals

php7 moved to testing

The php7 package has been moved to testing, as no more packages in community depend on it and php 7.4 will be EOL soon. php8 has taken it's place, which is php 8.0. Additionally 8.1 is shipped via community