Updates for Poppler, Plasma, Xfce, LLVM 11 Arrive in Tumbleweed

Four openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were released since our last blog more than a week ago.

These four snapshots had a variety of package updates that included updates for LLVM, Wireshark, Node.js, Plasma and Xfce.

A few hours ago, the first snapshot of the month of November was released with snapshot 20201104, which started trending at a rating of 90 on the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer. The snapshot brought the new major version of LLVM 11. More than half the changelog covers the additions and changes for this compiler. Generic improvements to Clang as a whole were made and new compiler flags like -fstack-clash-protection will provide protection against the stack clash attack for x86, s390x and ppc64 architectures. The edict package, which is a Japanese-English Dictionary in machine readable form received more than a year’s worth of updates in it’s 20201102 release. Node.js 14.15.0 had no major changes, but the Long-Term-Support version had a International Components for Unicode version bump. LibreOffice’s update to version 7.0.3.1 in Tumbleweed provided some bug fixes and translation updates. The update of Perl 5.32.0 brought in support of unicode 13.0 and Wireshark 3.2.8 took care of a build failure caused from the bison parser. The Xfce desktop fixed a memory leak when reconnecting to a DisplayPort monitor with the update of the xfdesktop 4.14.3 package.

KDE’s Plasma 5.20.2 updated in the 20201030 snapshot; the release had bug fixes for the window manager KWin like fixing the drag-and-drop cursors with HiDPI for Wayland. There were also a few other HiDPI fixes. Some behavior fixes were made to improve consistency with KScreen and the 5.20.2 plasma-desktop package had a fix for high CPU usage. Firmware update package fwupd 1.5.0 added async versions of the library for GUI tools and had some plugins to update the Broadcom BCM5719 network adapter.. Application Programming Interfaces library ncurses had a minor fix for a potential indexing error and changed a null-pointer check. Classification framework, nftables 0.9.7 updated support for implicit chains and for the reset command with the data-interchange format json. One package that hasn’t been listed in a Tumbleweed review before is sratom 0.6.6. Sratom is a library for serialising LV2 atoms, which is a generic data container for holding any type of plain old data, to and from the Resource Description Framework; the update had little listed in the changelog, but did fix some minor warnings and other code quality issues. The snapshot recorded a 75 rating on the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

Snapshot 20201029 updated btrfsprogs from version 5.7 to version 5.9, which removed obsolete mount options and switched the default to single profile for a multi-device filesystem. Text editor vim fixed a memory leak and crash when throwing empty strings in version 8.2.1900. Several Python implementations and libraries were updated in the snapshot like python-gevent 20.9.0, which provides a high-level synchronous API on top of the libev or libuv and python-ecdsa 0.16.0, which is implementation of Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm cryptography. Poppler now follows the upstream versioning of 20.10.0 and added UTF16LE support even though the standard says it should be UTF16BE. The snapshot recorded a 76 rating.

Snapshot 20201028 recorded a 78 rating and had updates of GStreamer 1.18.0, git 2.29.1, firebird 3.0.6.33328, iproute2 5.9.0 and libressl 3.2.2.