bzip2 1.0.8

We are happy to announce the release of bzip2 1.0.8.

This is a fixup release because the CVE-2019-12900 fix in bzip2 1.0.7 was too strict and might have prevented decompression of some files that earlier bzip2 versions could decompress. And it contains a few more patches from various distros and forks.

bzip2 1.0.8 contains the following fixes:

  • Accept as many selectors as the file format allows. This relaxes the fix for CVE-2019-12900 from 1.0.7 so that bzip2 allows decompression of bz2 files that use (too) many selectors again.
  • Fix handling of large (> 4GB) files on Windows.
  • Cleanup of bzdiff and bzgrep scripts so they don’t use any bash extensions and handle multiple archives correctly.
  • There is now a bz2-files testsuite at https://sourceware.org/git/bzip2-tests.git

Patches by Joshua Watt, Mark Wielaard, Phil Ross, Vincent Lefevre, Led and Kristýna Streitová.

This release also finalizes the move of bzip2 to a community maintained project at https://sourceware.org/bzip2/

Thanks to Bhargava Shastry bzip2 is now also part of oss-fuzz to catch fuzzing issues early and (hopefully not) often.