Version 15 of the PostgreSQL database management system is out.

PostgreSQL 15 builds on the performance improvements of recent releases with noticeable gains for managing workloads in both local and distributed deployments, including improved sorting. This release improves the developer experience with the addition of the popular MERGE command, and adds more capabilities for observing the state of the database.

There are a lot of changes in this release; click below for the details, and see the release notes for more.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libreoffice, rexical, ruby-nokogiri, and squid), Fedora (wavpack), Red Hat (expat), SUSE (gdcm, orthanc, orthanc-gdcm, orthanc-webviewer and rubygem-puma), and Ubuntu (GMP and unzip).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 13, 2022 is available.

At the end of September, Victor Stinner reported on a security bug fix he had been working on for a script from the CPython Tools/scripts directory. As part of that work, he realized that there were 74 scripts in that directory that were potentially outdated, unused, unmaintained, trivial, buggy, or some combination of all of those. It is not uncommon for projects to have code that accretes in overlooked corners of the source tree, but it makes sense to periodically take a look to see if changes are needed. Stinner seems to have kicked that off for Python with his message.

The 6.0.1, 5.19.15, and 5.15.73 stable kernels have been released; each contains a relatively small set of important fixes.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (mediawiki and twig), Oracle (expat, gnutls and nettle, and kernel), Red Hat (expat, kernel, and kpatch-patch), and Ubuntu (advancecomp and dotnet6).

The kernel's Bugzilla instance is largely unloved and ignored, at least as a bug-reporting tool for the bulk of the upstream kernel. At the recent Maintainers Summit, Bugzilla was discussed during the regression-handling session led by Thorsten Leemhuis. In a followup to that discussion, Leemhuis posted some ideas for improving the state of bugzilla.kernel.org to the ksummit-discuss mailing list recently; the resulting discussion helped clarify a number of problem areas for it—and for the Bugzilla tool itself.

The Opus codec is an audio codec that was designed from the beginning to avoid existing patents in the field and be royalty-free for all users. It was standardized by the IETF in 2012 as RFC 6716. Now a company called Vectis ("a premier full-suite IP licensing and consultancy boutique") is collecting patents that are claimed to read on Opus as a way of demanding royalties on its use. "The planned Opus program will focus on hardware devices and will not be directed towards open-source software, applications, services, or content". (Thanks to Paul Wise).

Version 7.0.0 of the VirtualBox virtualization system is out. Changes include support for fully encrypted virtual machines, a new performance-monitoring tool, improved theme support, and a number of new devices.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (connman, dbus, git, isc-dhcp, strongswan, and wordpress), Fedora (rubygem-pdfkit and seamonkey), Red Hat (gnutls, nettle, rh-ruby27-ruby, and rh-ruby30-ruby), SUSE (libgsasl, python, and snakeyaml), and Ubuntu (graphite2, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-bluefield, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-dell300x, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux-hwe, linux-oracle, openssh, and pcre3).