SLE 15 SP2 Schedule and Closing the (openSUSE) Leap Gap

We are finally able to clarify the SLE 15 SP2 Beta Schedule and announce an exciting new project, called Closing the Leap Gap.

SLE 15 SP2 Beta Schedule

First thing first, you will find below the new schedule and milestones:

• Public Beta – Feb 07th, 2020
• Public Release Candidate 1 – April 24th, 2020
• Public Release Candidate 2 – May 15th, 2020
• Public Gold Master Candidate – June 15th, 2020
• First Customer Shipment – End of July 2020

The main change is the move of the FCS from end of June to end of July, and this allows us to provide a second Public Release Candidate!

Of course this doesn’t affect our weekly updates provided in our Online Channels until GMC.

Now if you wonder why we are making changes to our schedule, please read below.

Closing the Leap Gap

On April 9th 2020, we were thrilled and excited to send a proposal to our openSUSE community about bringing openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise even closer together!

For 8 years, we were offering SLE’s sources for usage in openSUSE Leap, but now after getting the openSUSE community’s approval, we want to offer pre-built binaries from SLE in addition to the sources, to increase compatibility and to leverage synergies.

This idea/project is internally called Closing the Leap Gap.

We highly recommend you to read the full announcement made on the openSUSE Mailing List, and read the Closing the Leap Gap FAQ for more informations.

Please rest assured that nothing disruptive is planned for neither SLE 15 SP2 nor openSUSE Leap 15.2. However while investigating the consolidation of SLE code base with openSUSE Leap, we noticed aspects that require simplification and clean-up in our SLE packages before a release. These changes will improve supportability, code stability and also make it easier for third-party vendors to develop in a cross-platform fashion for SLES and openSUSE Leap.

Thus we have committed engineering resources to get this done properly, and had to delayed our SLE 15 SP2 schedule to make sure that we have additional time to implement, review, test any changes. Overall this will help us improve the quality of SLE 15 SP2 and decrease the number of potential maintenance updates at FCS.

Last but not least, we are at your disposal if you have any comments! And will be glad to have discussions with you.

More information

Please check out the openSUSE Proposal, the openSUSE FAQ, the openSUSE Leap Wiki page and of course https://www.suse.com/betaprogram/sle-beta for more information like beta schedule, how to report issues, how to start a discussion with SLE Engineering and more.

Have fun beta testing!

Your SUSE Linux Enterprise Team