Five Tumbleweed snapshots became available to users of openSUSE’s rolling release this week.

A couple smaller- and medium-sized snapshots brought new software updates for Xfce’s Thunar, the Linux Kernel, Mozilla Firefox, PostgreSQL, Python and more.

The 20210915 snapshot had two package updates. There was an update of translations for the manpages-l10n package to version 4.11.0, which enabled Hungarian translations. The tool set package for accessing and modifying virtual machine images, libguestfs 1.44.2, had a large amount of changes; it added and removed several patches and relicensed setup.py to LGPLv2+ from its original GPLv2+ license.

Xfce’s Thunar package was updated in snapshot 20210914; the update to the file manager 4.16.9 version fixed a memory leak, updated translations and disabled automatic queueing of file transfers. Linux Kernel 5.14.2 had a few USB serial control fixes and a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures fix; the fix for CVE-2021-3640 could allow a privileged local user to crash the system or escalate their privileges on a system. The package for video and image frames, pfstools, updated to version 2.2.0 and provided many fixes allowing the package to work with newer versions of libraries. Also updated in the snapshot were aria2 1.36.0 and text browser links 2.24.

Mozilla Firefox updated to the 92.0 major version in snapshot 20210913. A new feature is the full-range color levels now has support for video playback on many systems. Firefox can now automatically upgrade to HTTPS using HTTPS RR as Alt-Svc headers. An update of postgresql 13.4 had a fix build with LLVM12 on s390x and fixed CVE-2021-3677. Application builder python-kiwi 9.23.54 made some changes to fix behavior with the rsync tool. Other updates in the snapshot wre make to KDE’s amarok, tuned 2.16.0, libsrtp2 2.4.1 and more.

The 20210912 snapshot gave an update of Mozilla Thunderbird 91.1.0. The email client fixed two CVEs and a memory safety bug. An update of pipewire 0.3.35 made adjustments to the Bluetooth codecs and now separates these as plugins to make it easier to ship. PipeWire’s audio mixer can now mix more formats. The update of python38 3.8.12 provided security updates and made email-date parsing more robust against malformed input, namely a whitespace-only. Some YaST packages were updated like yast2-installation 4.4.18, which now displays release notes during an upgrade.

YaST also had some updates in the 20210910 snapshot; the yast2-update 4.4.3 package fixed a crash during a system upgrade, which synchronized the YaST and libzypp repositories to avoid deleting caches for used repositories. The 1.5.25 version of ibus added a patch to fix a build on openSUSE Leap and nmap 7.92 had some improvements to include the Transport Layer Security 1.3 supporting most scripts for which the security scanner is relevant. The 5.14.1 Linux Kernel was also in the snapshot.

Les Koppe Photography has added a photo to the pool:

The UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 1995 as the 'Historic Villages of Shirakawa-gō and Gokayama' lies in the isolated valley of the Shō-gawa (Shō River) southeast of Kanazawa, Japan. The three villages of Ogimachi, Ainokura and Suganuma comprise the site. The isolated nature of the region meant little contact with the outside world was possible until the 1950’s. The people living there were subsistence farmers growing rice, buckwheat and millet; practicing sericulture; making washi paper; and producing saltpeter used in the production of gunpowder. UNESCO describes the villages as “outstanding examples of traditional human settlements that are perfectly adapted to their environment and their social and economic raison d’étre.”

Farmhouses constructed of timber, straw and rope with no nails are the outstanding feature of the villages. Their gabled thatched roofs are pitched at 60º to shed snow, as the valley receives an average of over 10 m (33 ft.) of snow each year. The roofs resemble the shape of two hands joined in prayer and so the houses are known as gasshō-zukuri (praying hands). This architectural style is found nowhere else in Japan. UNESCO notes that “when their numbers reached their peak in the late 19th century, there were no more than 1,860 of them, out of a total of 5.5 million farmhouses in Japan." Ainokura, with an area of 18 ha (44.5 acres), is the northernmost of the villages. It has twenty gasshō-zukuri houses, five gasshō-zukuri style two-story buildings and seven 20th century reproductions.