Early release of Jenkins 2.538

[Jenkins Developers]

The Jenkins 2.537 release fails to connect SSH build agents.  The issue is reported in https://issues.jenkins.io/browse/JENKINS-76295 and is confirmed by both Markus Winter and me.  

The pull request to revert the change that caused the issue is https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/pull/11310

Considering the severity of the issue, I think we should run a weekly release Wednesday, Nov 19, 2025 that includes https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/pull/11310 .  I don't think we should make users of the Jenkins weekly build wait until next Tuesday.

That has the added benefit that it will provide another verification run of the new combined RPM packaging that supports both Red Hat and openSUSE from a single RPM.

Tim Jacomb, are you OK with that?  If so, I'm sure that Damien and Herve are willing to start the build on Wednesday morning, European time.

Mark Waite

[Darin Pope]

I noticed this when I upgraded today with macOS agents. My workaround was to delete the remoting.jar (and remoting directory) on the agents then do the reconnect. Everything has been fine since then. 

Regardless, I +1 an early 538.

Darin

[Damien Duportal]

Taking over from Mark, to confirm that the unplanned weekly release 2.538 is available (packages and Docker images).

We'll update the changelogs later today when Mark will have had a good night of sleep ;)

Thanks all!