Stable Sailing For Tumbleweed Snapshots This Week

Developers Can Make Use of GCC 9, QEMU 4, Wireshark 3

This week produced a smooth and rapid release of stable openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshot as the rolling release produced a total of five stable or trending stable snapshots, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

The production of snapshots provided both large and small package updates with GNU Compiler Collection 9, Wireshark 3.0.1, QEMU 4.0, KDE Applications 19.04.1, GNOME 3.32.2 and KDE Plasma 5.15.5 rounding out the largest package updates this week.

The latest Tumbleweed snapshot, 20190514, hailed in twenty recorded bug fixes for KDE Applications 19.04.1, which include improvements to Kontact, Ark, Cantor, Dolphin, Kdenlive, Spectacle and Umbrello. Among the highlighted fixes were a crash in KMail’s text sharing plugin that was fixed and regressions in the video editor Kdenlive were corrected. The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (alsa) 1.1.9 dropped several patches and fixed a rate plugin for comparisons as well as added support for GCC’s LinkTimeOptimization. The VLC audio visual decoder package dav1d 0.3.1 provided arm optimization for Multiple Sequence Alignment Compressor (MSAC). The package that has the implementation of HTTP/2 and its header compression algorithm HPACK in C, nghttp2, fixed a compilation against modern LibreSSL in the 1.38.0 version update. Tcsh 6.21.00 ported patches and the 4.2.15 version of yast2-storage-ng worked on the partitioner to prevent edition of block devices that are part of a multi-device Btrfs. The snapshot is currently trending at a 96 rating, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

There were three packages updated in snapshot 20190512. Mozilla Firefox 66.0.5 made further improvements to re-enable web extensions that had been disabled for users with a master password. The operating system information database libosinfo 1.5.0 fixed the the loading of the architecture value of OsinfoImages and added  Application Programming Interface (API) to set and get an OS from and to OsinfoTrees & OsinfoImages and osinfo-db 20190504 dropped an add support patch for Leap 15.1. The snapshot is currently trending at a 97 rating, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

Snapshot 20190510 reined in GCC 9 and is the first Tumbleweed snapshot to make use of the GCC9 libraries. The snapshot produced several other major version updates. Both Wireshark 3.0.1 and QEMU 4.0 were included in the snapshot. QEMU 4.0 had tons of new improvements for arm, PowerPC, MIPS, s390, x86 and RISC-V. One of the more noteworthy changes were ARMv8 extensions for SB, PredInv, HPD, LOR, FHM, AA32HPD, PAuth, JSConv, CondM, FRINT, and BTI. Wireshark 3.0.1 added the  IP map feature back in a modernized form and addressed several Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. Also, TShark now supports the -G elastic-mapping option which generates an ElasticSearch mapping file. GNOME 3.32.2 updated translations, fixed a crash when closing the updates dialog before the content has loaded, and gnome-maps updated some unnecessary instructions in turn-by-turn route searches. IPv6 had a few fixes with the update of the 5.0.13 Linux Kernel. Add support for setting the emulator scheduler parameters were made for QEMU with libvirt 5.3.0 and python-libvirt-python 5.3.0 added all new APIs and constants in libvirt 5.3.0. With all these major updates, the snapshot is remarkably still trending at a 96 rating on the snapshot reviewer.

KDE Plasma 5.15.5 came out just two days after the software was released from upstream in the 20190509 snapshot. The Breeze theme had fix build with Qt 4 and Plasma addons fixed a default visibility unit for non-metric locales. The support library used in the Xfce desktop exo 0.12.5 moved around components to align with the correct library versions. Scripting language php7 7.3.5 fixed a core dump when using server controls for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). The snapshot posted stable 94 rating on snapshot reviewer.

The snapshot that started off the week, 20190508, has four packages update. The packages were perl-libwww-perl 6.39, plasma-browser-integration 5.15.5, squid 4.7 and xdg-desktop-portal-kde 5.15.5. Squid 4.7 listed a bunch of CVEs that were fixed either without properly referencing them during the fix or 4.x branch was never affected by them. It also fixed stack-based buffer-overflow when parsing Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) messages. The snapshot posted stable 97 rating on snapshot reviewer.