Hi All,
To make it clear this is nothing to do with Core Update 177 Testing.
Someone on the forum reported a problem with trying to run the sox addon.
I had a look at sox and tried to install it and then ran sox --version which then came up with a missing library. Installed the addon that provided that library and then there was another missing library and so on.
sox kept having missing libraries until I had installed all of the following:-
alsa flac libmad libid3tag lame
The only dependency listed in sox was libvorbis. All these others should really be present as well.
After installing all those dependencies I ran sox --version and basically sox just hangs with no response at all. Ctrl C was required to stop it.
So I was wondering why sox was added to IPFire originally.
Looking through the web site info I found that the current version was released in 2015. The last commit looks to have been in 2021.
I found that Arch Linux is taking a git snapshot version due to there being many unfixed security vulnerabilities. Additionally they are patching with a patch that was used in Openwall to deal with 8 CVE's plus a fix for a CVE fix that introduced a regression.
The above does not make me feel very comfortable at all with having sox in IPFire.
It is described as the Swiss Army knife of sound processing programs and my view, based on my investigation, is that it should be removed from IPFire.
If users want to use it then it should be done on machines on the lan connected to IPFire, not on IPFire itself.
Looking forward to feedback on my observations and conclusion.
Regards,
Adolf.