Tumbleweed Snapshots Trending High with Bash, PulseAudio, Curl Updates

Three openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots released this week brought about two dozen new versions of software.

The snapshots brought one new major version update for pulseaudio and an updated version of bash.

The major version update to pulseaudio 13.0 came in Snapshot 20190921. The sound server program improved the initial card profile selection for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) cards and improved the play 5.1 surround audio that now treats both “side” or “rear” channels identically when the user has a 5.1 speaker setup; the 7.1 setup still has a difference which channel pair gets used. The libreoffice 6.3.2.2 package had some stability tweaks and addressed two Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE), which one had an unsafe URL assembly flaw. The cabextract program that un-archives files in the Microsoft cabinet file format modernized the spec file in its 1.9.1 version. Another package updated in the snapshot was osinfo-db, which is a package that provides a database of information about operating systems for virtualization provisioning tools. The snapshot is trending at a stable rating of 95, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

The 20190920 snapshot is also trending at a stable rating of 95. This snapshot updated bash from version 5.0 to 5.0.11. The minor update to bash change posix mode behavior. The Mesa 3D graphics library 19.1.7. The update fixed a KWin compositor crashes on launch as well as a few other bugs. Command line tool and library curl 7.66.0 added experimental feature for HTTP/3 that is disabled by default but can be enabled and works, according to this tutorial from Daniel Stenberg. Two CVEs were also fixed with the curl update. The 26.3 version of the emacs text editors has a newly assigned codepoint U+32FF that was added to the Unicode Character Database compiled into Emacs, which now supports the new Japanese Era name. Software development tool swig 4.0.1 added Python 3.8 support and fixed some minor regressions that were introduced in the 4.0.0 major release. An updated version of plymouth added a time delay of 8 seconds to fit an AMD graphics card for graphical boot animation.

The snapshot that started off the week, 20190918, brought an update for Mozilla Thunderbird. The mail clients 68.1.0 squashed bugs like a car speeding on the autobahn on a muggy day; A total of six CVEs were addressed in the update including CVE-2019-11739, which allowed for a Covert Content Attack on S/MIME encryption using a crafted multipart/alternative message. File searching utility catfish 1.4.10 added some new features and improved the application menu to make better use of space, padding, and margins. The snapshot is recorded a moderately stable rating of 90, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.