Latest Tumbleweed Snapshot Brings Major Versions of Flatpak, qemu, Thunderbird , Nano

Since the last openSUSE Tumbleweed update, three snapshots have been released and the latest snapshot has brought two new major versions of both Flatpak and qemu.

On the heels of the Libre Application Summit last week, which is a conference focusing on sandboxing and application distribution, a new major version of Flatpak was released in Snapshot 20180911. Flatpak 1.0 marks a significant improvement in performance and reliability, and includes a big collection of bug fixes with a collection of new features. Naturally, libostree 2018.8 was updated with Flatpak and added a new feature that provides an auto-update-summary config option for repositories. Full-system emulation with qemu 3.0.0 isn’t necessarily significant. The changelog states not to “read anything into the major version number update. It’s been decided to increase the major version number each year.” Yet there is improved support for nested Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) guests running on Hyper-V. The project did emphasized that ongoing feature deprecation is tracked at both //wiki.qemu-project.org/Features/LegacyRemoval and in Appendix B of the qemu-doc.* files installed with the qemu package. Mesa 18.1.7 had a handful of fixes and once again added wayland to egl_platforms. The Linux Kernel 4.18.7 added support for Intel Ice Lake microarchitecture in the snapshot. There were several other minor updates in the snapshot, but the nodejs10 update to version 10.9.0 brought a few Common Vulnerability and Exposure (CVE) fixes and upgraded dependencies to OpenSSL 1.0.2.

Mozilla Thunderbird also received a major version update this week in snapshot 20180910. Thunderbird 60.0 improved message handling and composing and also provided Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) fixes. A list of CVEs were addressed with the update and the email client also added support for OAuth2 and FIDO U2F. Pixel format translation library babl updated its license to LGPL 3.0 in with the version update to 0.1.56. The library and command-line tool for transferring data using various protocols known as curl had several changes in version 7.61.1 and warn the user if a given file name looks like an option. The GNOME Web browser package epiphany 3.28.4 fixes a crash on homedepot.com and improved the performance of adblocker. The 4.18.6 kernel was made available in this snapshot. Text editor nano 3.0  also had a major version update and provided some speed improvements. Pdf renderer poppler 0.68.0 added Reason and Location to SignatureInfo. Web developers will be happy to see webkit2gtk3 2.22.0. The updated webkit2gtk3 package provides a new JavaScriptCore GLib application programming interface (API) and added playbin3 support to GStreamer media backend.

The snapshot that started off the week, 20180905 updated libssh to version 0.8.2. The newer version improves compiler flag detection, removed support for deprecated SSHv1 protocol and added support for OpenSSL 1.1 as well as crypto backend for the mbedtls crypto library. Some Bluetooth crashes were fixed with wireshark 2.6.3 and sysdig 0.23.1 added fixes on custom containers support. Virtualbox fixed some API changes related to the 4.19 release candidate kernel.

All snapshots are stable according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer with snapshot 20180905 recording a 93 rating and snapshots 20180911 and 20180910 both trending at a 96 rating.