Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.18-rc2, released on October 19. Linus remarked:

End result: rc2 is on the bigger side, and we still have some of the remaining regressions outstanding, but we should be making slow progress. It's fairly early days yet, so I'm not very worried. Things on the whole look fairly normal.

Stable updates: 6.17.4 6.12.54 6.6.113 6.1.157, and 5.15.195 were released on October 19.

The 6.17.5, 6.12.55, and 6.6.114 updates are in the review process; they are due on October 23.

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Fedora Council approves AI-assisted contributions policy

The Fedora Council has approved an AI-assisted contributions policy. This follows several weeks of discussion, some of which was covered by LWN on October 1. The final policy contains substantial differences from the initial proposal, and now requires disclosure of AI tools "when the significant part of the contribution is taken from a tool without changes".

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OpenBSD 7.8 released

OpenBSD 7.8 has been released. As usual, this release includes a long list of changes; see the changelog for all of the details.

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Distributions quote of the week

News coverage of other OSs is more like business news, where each OS has one official PR operation with a few media-trained people. News coverage of Linux is more like sports journalism, where reporters can find newsworthy people on different teams competing to do different things, which includes talking about problems.

— Don Marti

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DigiKam 8.8.0 released

Version 8.8.0 of the digiKam photo-management system has been released. "This version delivers significant improvements in performance, stability, and user experience, with a particular focus on image processing, color management, and workflow efficiency". Changes include an import/export feature for tag hierarchies, focus-point visualization for some camera models, automatic use of the monitor color profile, and a background-blur tool.

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Forgejo 13.0 released

Version 13.0 of the Forgejo software forge has been released. Notable changes in this release include content moderation features, ability to require two-factor authentication for users or administrators, and a migration feature for Pagure repositories. The last will be useful for Fedora's move to Forgejo as its new git forge. See the release notes for all changes in 13.0.

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KDE Plasma 6.5 released

KDE Plasma 6.5 has been released. Notable new features include automatic light-to-dark theme switching based on time of day, support for the experimental Wayland picture-in-picture protocol, as well as a number of usability and accessibility improvements. See the complete changelog for a list of the new features, enhancements, and bug fixes.

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Transition of RubyGems Repository Ownership

The Ruby community has experienced some turbulence of late after Ruby Central took control of the GitHub repositories for a number of projects including RubyGems and Bundler. Those projects have historically been developed separately from Ruby itself. They are now being put under the control of Ruby's core team, according to Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto (a.k.a. "Matz"):

To provide the community with long-term stability and continuity, the Ruby core team, led by Matz, has decided to assume stewardship of these projects from Ruby Central. We will continue their development in close collaboration with Ruby Central and the broader community.

Ruby Central has also issued a statement.

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Valkey 9.0.0 released

Version 9.0.0 of the Valkey distributed key-value database has been released. Notable features of this release include Multipath TCP (MPTCP) support, new filters for client commands, multi-database support for cluster mode and much more. See the Valkey 9.0.0 RC1 release notes for a full list of new features in this major release.

According to a recent blog post, this release includes major improvements to performance and scaling of Valkey clusters to more than 2,000 nodes and one billion requests per second. Valkey began as a fork of the Redis key-value database in March 2024, but has evolved separately since then.

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Development quote of the week

I am simultaneously excited for the implementation techniques that Python free threading is going to open up for framework authors and deeply concerned about the way I see discussions going around it, as it seems application authors will be speedrunning the "you can fit so many untestable data races in here" to "you can fit so many intractable mutex deadlocks in here" pipeline that Java previewed for us all in the early aughts.

— Glyph

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