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The idea of adding None-aware operators to Python has sprung up once again. These would make traversing structures with None values in them easier, by short-circuiting lookups when a None is encountered. Almost exactly a year ago, LWN covered the previous attempt to bring the operators to Python, but there have been periodic discussions stretching back to 2015 and possibly before. This time Noah Kim has taken up the cause. After some debate, he eventually settled on redrafting the existing PEP to have a more limited scope, which might finally see it move past the cycle of debate, resurrection, and abandonment that it has been stuck in for most of the last decade.

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The kernel is, on its face, a single large development project, but internally it is better viewed as 100 or so semi-independent projects all crammed into one big tent. Within those projects, there is a fair amount of latitude about how changes are managed, and some subsystems are using that freedom in the search for more efficient ways of working. In the end, though, all of these sub-projects have to work together and interface with kernel-wide efforts, including the stable-release and CVE-assignment processes. For some time, there has been friction between the direct rendering (DRM, or graphics) subsystem and the stable maintainers; that friction recently burst into view in a way that shows some of the limitations of how the kernel community manages patches.

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The Ghostty terminal emulator project has generated a surprising amount of interest, even before code was released to the public. This is in part due to the high profile of its creator, HashiCorp founder Mitchell Hashimoto. Its development was conducted behind closed doors for beta testing, until version 1.0 was released on December 26 under the MIT license. While far from finished, Ghostty is ready for day-to-day use and might be of interest to those who spend significant amounts of time at the command line.

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TuxFamily is a French free-software-hosting service that has been in operation since 1999. It is a non-profit that accepts "any project released under a free license", whether that is a software license or a free-content license, such as CC-BY-SA. It is also, unfortunately, slowly dying due to hardware failures and lack of interest. For example, the site's download servers are currently offline with no plan to restore them.

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The ptrace() system call allows a suitably privileged process to modify another in a large number of ways. Among other things, ptrace() can intercept system calls and make changes to them, but such operations can be fiddly and architecture-dependent. This patch series from Dmitry Levin seeks to improve that situation by adding a new ptrace() operation to make changes to another process's system calls in an architecture-independent manner.

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Chimera Linux is a new distribution designed to be "simple, transparent, and easy to pick up". The distribution is built from scratch, and recently announced its first beta release. While the documentation and installation process are both a bit rough, the project already provides a usable desktop with plenty of useful software — one built primarily on tools adopted from BSD.

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The death of Bram Moolenaar, Vim founder and benevolent dictator for life (BDFL), in 2023 sent a shock through the community, and raised concern about the future of the project. At VimConf 2024 in November, current Vim maintainer Christian Brabandt delivered a keynote on "the new Vim project" that detailed how the community has reorganized itself to continue maintaining Vim and what the future looks like.

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Attacks on the kernel can take many forms; one popular exploitation path is to find a way to overwrite some memory with attacker-supplied data. If the right memory can be targeted, one well-targeted stray write is all that is needed to take control of the system. Since the system's page tables regulate access to memory, they are an attractive target for this type of attack. This patch set from Kevin Brodsky is an attempt to protect page tables (and, eventually, other data structures) using the "memory protection keys" feature provided by a number of CPU architectures.

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