~lwn | Bookmarks (380)

Reading an established open-source project's developer mailing list may leave new contributors wishing they had a decoder ring. Greg Sabino Mullane has written up a valuable explainer for those new to the PostgreSQL hackers (pgsql-hackers) mailing list that may also be useful for decoding other lists as well: The mailing lists are full of acronyms and jargon that might not be familiar to younger...

Here is a piece of advice for anybody wanting an easy and frustration-free life: do not run your own email system. While there numerous advantages to keeping some control over your communications, there is also a long list of things that can go wrong. A recent failure of spam filtering on the LWN email system illustrated one of those ways, as well as shining...

Back in 2021, the ElasticSearch search engine and Kibana visualization platform were relicensed under the non-free Server Side Public License (SSPL). Now, Elastic (the company owning those projects) has announced that those projects will also be distributable under the Affero GPL license. We never stopped believing and behaving like an open source community after we changed the license. But being able to use the...

Dave Airlie makes an analogy between the stages of road building and those of adding Rust to the Linux kernel. For the wayfinders the process of interacting with maintainers is frustrating and slow, and they don't enjoy it as much as wayfinding, and because they still only care about the hotel at the end, when a maintainer gets into the details of their particular...

The venerable AnandTech site has announced its closing after 27 years of technology-industry coverage. Still, few things last forever, and the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was – nor will it ever be again. So, the time has come for AnandTech to wrap up its work, and let the next generation of tech journalists take their place within the zeitgeist....

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (libvpx, postgresql, postgresql:12, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, and python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9), Debian (chromium and ghostscript), Fedora (python3.13), and SUSE (chromium and podman).

The KDE project plans to directly ask for donations in the Plasma desktop starting with version 6.2. According to this blog post by Nate Graham, users will see a system notification once per year (in December) asking for a donation to the non-profit KDE e.V.: Now, I know that messages like this can be controversial! The change was carefully considered, and we tried our best...

Version 5.0.0 of GNU Screen has been released. Notable changes in this release include new commands for authentication, input into multiple windows at the same time, and to turn on/off truecolor support.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.10.7, 6.6.48, and 6.1.107 stable kernels. They all contain important fixes throughout the kernel tree, as is the norm.

Plasma Mobile is an open-source user interface for mobile devices, developed by the KDE community. It's built on the same foundations as Plasma Desktop, including KDE Frameworks and the KWin window manager. Much like its desktop counterpart, Plasma Mobile caters to advanced users by offering extensive customizability. It is offered as an option on phones with various mobile Linux distributions.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind and bind-dyndb-ldap and postgresql:16), Fedora (less and python3.6), Mageia (nodejs & yarnpkg), Oracle (libvpx and postgresql:16), Red Hat (edk2, git, kernel, openldap, postgresql:15, postgresql:16, python3, and python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9), SUSE (apache2, python-setuptools, and python3-setuptools), and Ubuntu (linux-oracle).

Wedson Almeida Filho, one of the key developers driving the Rust-for-Linux project, has retired from the project. After almost 4 years, I find myself lacking the energy and enthusiasm I once had to respond to some of the nontechnical nonsense, so it's best to leave it up to those who still have it in them. As an example of the sort of "nonsense" he...

Immutable data makes concurrent access easier, since it eliminates the data-race conditions that can plague multithreaded programs. At PyCon 2024, Yury Selivanov introduced an early-stage project called MemHive, which uses Python subinterpreters and immutable data to overcome the problems of thread serialization that are caused by the language's Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). Recent developments in the Python world have opened up different strategies for avoiding...

Achieving consensus among Debian Developers on technical topics and procedures can be, to put it mildly, challenging. Nevertheless, that is exactly what Otto Kekäläinen has tried to do with a proposal that would set up "principles all Debian packages should follow to be open for collaboration in package maintenance". In the near term, it seems unlikely that the proposal will be accepted, but the...

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (calibre, dotnet8.0, dovecot, webkit2gtk4.0, and webkitgtk), Oracle (nodejs:20), Red Hat (bind, bind and bind-dyndb-ldap, postgresql:16, and squid), Slackware (kcron and plasma), SUSE (keepalived and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (drupal7).

The Mono project was started in 2001 to develop a .NET environment for Linux systems. Microsoft has owned that project since 2016, but has not made a major release since 2019. The company has now announced that Mono is being handed over to the WineHQ organization, which will maintain the repository going forward. Microsoft, meanwhile, is steering users toward its "modern fork" that it...

KDE developer Carl Schwan has announced the release of Calligra Office version 4.0. The most significant changes in this release include a "major overhaul" of the office suite's user interface, and a transition to Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6.

Nominations are now open for people interested in joining the Ubuntu Community Council, "the highest governance body of the Ubuntu project". Any Ubuntu Member can apply from now until Sunday, September 22 at 23:59 UTC. The Ubuntu project turned 20 this year, but is still in constant flux. The advent of new communication platforms, new projects under our umbrella, and the ever-growing popularity of...

On August 13, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published the final form of its new post-quantum cryptographic standards. One key-exchange mechanism and two digital-signature schemes are now officially sanctioned by the institute. Adopting the new standards should be fairly painless for most developers, but the overhead added by the schemes could pose challenges for some applications.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (nodejs:20), Debian (python3.11), Fedora (dotnet8.0), Red Hat (bind, krb5, libreoffice, linux-firmware, orc, orc:0.4.28, and orc:0.4.31), SUSE (mariadb and openssl-3), and Ubuntu (linux-aws-5.4).

The developers of the Pidgin chat program have announced that a malicious plugin had been listed on its third-party plugins list for over one month. This plugin included a key logger and could capture screenshots. It went unnoticed at the time that the plugin was not providing any source code and was only providing binaries for download. Going forward, we will be requiring that...

The FreeBSD Foundation has announced that Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) has agreed to invest €686,400 toward improvements in the FreeBSD project's infrastructure, security, regulatory compliance, and developer experience: The work commissioned by STF also aligns closely with the recent August 9, 2024 summary report released by the U.S. Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD), consolidating feedback from the 2023 request for information...

The genksyms tool has long been buried deeply within the kernel's build system; it is one of the two C-code parsers shipped with the kernel (the other being the horrifying kernel-doc script). It is a key part of how the kernel's module-loading infrastructure works. While genksyms has quietly done its job for decades, that period may soon be coming to an end. It would...