Linux Weekly News

Linus has released 6.11-rc6 for testing. "Things look pretty normal, although we have perhaps unusually many filesystem fixes here, spread out over smb, xfs, bcachefs and netfs."

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 people who did not grow up on email (although text messages have inherited many of the abbreviations). If you are a non-native English speaker, or under the age of 30, or not steeped in the world of tech, I offer some solutions below.

To do this, I downloaded the last year's worth of hackers email, wrote a program to strip out all the non-human stuff (headers, code blocks, attachments, etc.), and then did some data analysis on the results.

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 a light on how even a seemingly independent email system is tied to other services across the net.

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 term Open Source, by using AGPL, an OSI approved license, removes any questions, or fud, people might have.

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 intersection they don't want to do anything but go stay in their hotel.

The road will get built, it will get traffic on it. There will be tunnels where we should have intersections, there will be bridges that need to be built from both sides, but I do think it will get built.

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.

The site will surely be missed.

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 to minimize the annoying-ness factor: It's small and unobtrusive, and no matter what you do with it (click any button, close it, etc) it'll go away until next year. It's implemented as a KDE Daemon (KDED) module, which allows users and distributors to permanently disable it if they like.

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 referred to, he provided a link to the video from the Rust for filesystems discussion at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. His work was fundamental to getting the project as far as it has come; he will be missed.

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 29, 2024 is available.

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 the longstanding problems with the GIL.

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 discussion may be effective at improving collaboration nonetheless.

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 continues to maintain.

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 the project requires our community to evolve. We need to make sure Ubuntu is set to tackle the challenges of the next 20 years. It needs a strong and active community council to guide the project forwards.

See Merlijn Sebrechts's blog post, "A year in the Ubuntu community council", for an overview of what it's like to serve on the council.