Critical flaw in package libvips42 (Xenial)

[Stefano Cossu]

Dear Ubuntu MOTU Developers,

I came across a critical bug with the libvips42 v8.2.2 (and related 
libvips-dev) packaged in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

As explained in this thread[1], this version of the library has a major 
memory leak that causes a long-running program to consume very large 
amount of RAM, eventually crashing.

This behavior has been observed in a Python script using the most recent 
pyvips from pip (2.1.5), but after compilig the latest libvips (8.7.4) 
the script did not cause a leak (with a caveat, see thread).

I would suggest to update the libvips42 and libvips-dev packages with 
the latest stable release (just curious: what is the "42" in the package 
name?)

Thank you,
Stefano Cossu

[1] https://github.com/libvips/pyvips/issues/88