Thunderbird, YaST, Sudo Updates Arrive in Tumbleweed

Three openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were released since the last blog.

The three Tumbleweed snapshots this week brought a newer Linux Kernel, several rubygem package updates and improvements for an Xfce support library.

Snapshot 20181126 brought the 4.19.4 Linux Kernel, which fixed accelerated VLAN handling and fixed a memory leak with the Nouveau secure boot. Yet another Setup Tool (YaST) had some updates with yast2-fonts 4.0.2 that changes the desktop file fonts to system-wide fonts and multiple translations were also updated with the yast2-trans package. The support library for Xfce desktop environment, exo, updated to version 0.12.3; it improved layout spacing and alignment and hides the exo launchers from GNOME Software. The package for Integrated Development Environment cross-platform, kdevelop5 5.3.0, brought improved language support for php, python and c++; it also offers a new clazy analyzer plugin. Multiple other libraries were updated including libjansson 2.11, libsemanage 2.8, libsepol 2.8, libzypp 17.9.0 and more. Several rubygem packages were updated in the snapshot and rubygem-bundler 1.17.1 had a significant amount of additions and improvements including an add config option to disable platform warnings. The mailutils 3.5 package for the handling of email fixed a bug in the base64 encoder. Parser generator bison 3.2.2 brought massive improvements to the deterministic C++ skeleton, lalr1.cc and the library for manipulation of TIFF images, tiff 4.0.10, added a few patches that address the 10 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) patches that were removed.

Eight packages were updated in the 20181122 snapshot; three of them were YaST associated packages like yast2-ntp-client 4.1.6, which aligned a  ”Synchronize Now” button and “NTP Server Address” box, which doesn’t break the previous fix and does not hide the manual checkbox in TextMode. The fourth release candidate of the free implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) freerdp 2.0.0,  added support to set the Transport Layer Security (TLS) security level for openssl 1.1.0 and also added smartcard support for substring filters. Sudo now treats the LOGNAME and USER environment variables (as well as the LOGIN variable on AIX) as a single unit with the update to sudo 1.8.26, which also added support for the OpenLDAP TLS_REQCERT setting in the ldap.conf. The xapian-core 1.4.9 package fixed a bug to efficiently handle insertion of a batch of extra positions in ascending order, which could lead to missing positions and corrupted encoded positional data, according to the changelog.

Tumbleweed snapshot 20181120 brought Mozilla Thunderbird 60.3.1 and this version fixes the cookie removal that had not been working since Thunderbird version 52. GNU Compiler Collection 8 updated the branch head and removed a patch. The gobject-introspection 1.58.1 dropped a warnlib patch and re-added the /usr/bin/env to the python-cmd. The only major version update this week came in the package update of iso-codes from version 3.79 to version 4.1, which updated languages in South Africa and translations in Italian and Exstonian. Spell checking packages gtkspell3 3.0.10 and hunspell 1.7.0 received some minor updates. The Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) Software Developers Kit (SDK) package, libupnp 1.8.4, provided some fixes to correctly communicate with some televisions and had some compiler fixes. Command line utility skopeo 0.1.32 updated vendored libraries and updated the project location from ‘projectatomic’ to ‘containers’. The filesystem package xfsprogs 4.19.0 removed retpoline support and had a majority of 4.19 libxfs changes merged from the kernel.

Snapshot 20181120 logged was a moderately stable rating of 83, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer. Snapshot 20181122 is trending at a 91 rating and snapshot 20181126 is trending at an 88 rating.