Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.13-rc4, released on December 22. Linus said: "So this definitely is looking a bit smaller than most rc4s, and I expect (and hope) that rc5 will be absolutely tiny because you should all already be relaxing over the xmas holidays. But hey, if somebody is out there keeping the lights on, please do keep testing."

Stable updates: 6.12.6, 6.6.67, 6.1.121, 5.15.175, 5.10.232, and 5.4.288 were released on December 19.

The 6.12.7, 6.6.68, and 6.1.122 updates are in the review process; they are due on December 27.

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Quote of the week

It turns out that RCU has no fewer than 11 ways to wait for a grace period, a fact that would have shocked my year-2000 self. But here we are.

— Paul McKenney

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Fedora Linux 41 election results

The Fedora Project has announced the results of the Fedora Linux 41 election cycle. Five seats were open on the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), and the winners are Kevin Fenzi, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, David Cantrell, Tomáš Hrčka, and Fabio Alessandro Locati. One seat was open on the Mindshare Committee and that went to Luis Bazan as the only eligible candidate nominated in this period.

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Grml 2024.12 released

Version 2024.12 of the Debian-based Grml live Linux system for system administrators has been released. Grml 2024.12 uses packages from the upcoming Debian 13 ("trixie") release. It drops support for 32-bit x86 PCs and gains support for 64-bit ARM CPUs. See the release notes for a full list of changes and new features.

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Distributions quote of the week

Debian is not a distribution that says "whatever upstream does is always right". We have Debian Policy for a reason, and part of the point of a distribution is to ensure packages meet that policy, providing uniform behavior for sysadmins.

— Josh Triplett

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Stenberg: Dropping hyper

Curl maintainer Daniel Stenberg announces that the curl project will be dropping hyper, its experimental HTTP backend written in Rust, due to lack of developer interest.

While the experiment itself is deemed a failure, I think we learned from it and improved curl in the process. We had to rethink and reassess several implementation details when we aligned HTTP behavior with hyper. libcurl parses and handles HTTP stricter now. Better.

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Darktable 5.0.0 released

Version 5.0.0 of the darktable photography workflow application has been released. Major changes in this release include user-interface/user-experience (UI/UX) improvements, speed improvements for bulk operations, and the addition of a inter-script-communication event to allow a running script to send messages to another running script. LWN last looked at darktable in 2022.

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Fish shell announces 4.0 beta release

fish is a shell with a custom language and several affordances not available out of the box in other shells, such as directory-sensitive command completion. Although the project does not normally make beta releases, the newly announced 4.0b1 release will have one in order to ensure that no problems were introduced after a major effort to switch the code base from C++ to Rust.

fish is a smart and user-friendly command line shell with clever features that just work, without needing an advanced degree in bash scriptology. Today we are announcing an open beta, inviting all users to try out the upcoming 4.0 release.

fish 4.0 is a big upgrade. It's got lots of new features to make using the command line easier and more enjoyable, such as more natural key binding and expanded history search. And under the hood, we've rebuilt the foundation in Rust to embrace modern computing.

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Development quotes of the week

We, the WordPress community, need to decide if we're ok being led by a single person who controls everything, and might do things we disagree with, or if we want something else. For a project whose tagline is "Democratizing publishing", we've been very low on exactly that: democracy.

— Joost de Valk

One fun anecdote is that companies or governments will often say they need months or years to prepare (CLEAN UP) code for open sourcing. Because on the inside, people allow themselves far worse code than they'd prefer to share with the outside world. Open source code often has higher standards, and it is a great mechanism of keeping you on track.

If you can get away with it of course.

— Bert Hubert

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