Tumbleweed Gets New grep, Linux Kernel 4.20

A total of two snapshots have arrived in openSUSE Tumbleweed since last week’s article about the rolling release.

The two snapshots delivered new versions of grep, VLC, KDE Applications and Frameworks, Thunderbird, wireshark and more.

The latest snapshot, 20190121, provided updates of KDE Applications 18.12.1 and Frameworks 5.54.0. Applications 18.12.1 offers about 20 bug fixes. Sorting columns in the JuK music player has been fixed, Akregator now works with WebEngine from Qt 5.11 or newer and Konsole once again correctly renders box-drawing characters. Breeze Icons added YaST and new preference icons with the update to Frameworks 5.54.0, which also fixed a bug in KIO that made the open url in the tab feature a bit more discoverable. Kwayland also fixed XDGForeign Client header installs. Support for 12 bits decoding of AV1 was added with vlc 3.0.6. A minor update to GNU Compiler Collection 8 includes a backport of asm inline. The lightweight Integrated Development Environment geany 1.34.1 now automatically detects the GTK version to build against. A patch was made to the update of java-12-openjdk 12.0.0.0~26, which included a fix that introduces a diagnostic flag to abort Virtual Machines operating too long. A fix for Mariabackup that failed to copy encrypted InnoDB system tablespace of the log sequence numbers (LSN) was made with mariadb 10.2.21. Visual diff and merge tool meld 3.20.0 added an Enter as a Compare accelerator in folder comparisons. The update of mutt 1.11.2 fixed a compilation with the latest OpenSSL version along with various other bug fixes. Several rubygem packages were also updated in the snapshot. Two recent issues were fixed in the purple-facebook 0.9.6 package; one addressed a failed to get sync_sequence_id and the other was a failed to read fixed header. Samba 4.9.4 addressed two Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures(CVE)  including a fix of a CNAME loop prevention using counter regression.

The snapshot that started the week was 20190115 and it brought the 4.20.0 Linux Kernel and Mozilla Thunderbird 60.4.0, which added WebExtensions FileLink Application Programming Interface (API) to facilitate FileLink add-ons. More than 30 performance improvements were made with the update of grep 3.3, which now diagnoses stack overflow. The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture  package alsa  1.1.8 dropped some obsolete patches and added a Unified Change Management  (UCM) setting for Dell Edge IoT platforms. Parser generator bison updated to version 3.2.4. An update to GNOME’s personal information management application evolution 3.30.4 clamps GSettings values before restoring window size. A jump was make from libvirt-glib 1.0.0 to 2.0.0 and it modernize gobject macro usage. Among notable packages updated in the snapshot were gucharmap 11.0.3, mercurial 4.8.2, python-pyOpenSSL 18.0.0, sqlite3 3.26.0 and wireshark 2.6.6.

Snapshot 20190115 recorded an unstable rating of 61, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer. Snapshot 20190121 is trending at as moderately stable with a rating of 78.