Brief items
Kernel development
Kernel release status
The current development kernel is 4.17-rc4, released on May 6. Linus said: "Two thirds of the 4.17-rc4 patch is drivers, which sounds about right. Media, networking, rdma, input, nvme, usb. A little bit of everything, in other words." The codename has been changed, for the first time since 4.10, to "Merciless Moray".
Stable updates: 4.16.8, 4.14.40, and 4.9.99 were released on May 9.
Quotes of the week
If we could script taste, we'd have replaced Linus with something
far less cantankerous a long time ago.
— James Bottomley
What if, instead, Linus doesn't actually ever release a point
release? We can make the merge window open more often, and since
there's no actual release, people won't rush to push fixes in later
-rc cycles.
— Sasha Levin
We take away the incentive to push poorly tested code. Maintainers still free to commit anything they'd like, but there's no reason to commit code they're not confident of just to make it to a random release no one will use.
Well, let me put it this way...
— Paul McKenney
Here is your nice elegant little algorithm.
Here is your nice elegant little algorithm equipped to survive within the Linux kernel.
Any questions? ;-)
Distributions
The plan for merging CoreOS into Red Hat
The CoreOS blog is carrying an article describing the path forward now that CoreOS is owned by Red Hat. "Since Red Hat’s acquisition of CoreOS was announced, we received questions on the fate of Container Linux. CoreOS’s first project, and initially its namesake, pioneered the lightweight, 'over-the-air' automatically updated container native operating system that fast rose in popularity running the world’s containers. With the acquisition, Container Linux will be reborn as Red Hat CoreOS, a new entry into the Red Hat ecosystem. Red Hat CoreOS will be based on Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources and is expected to ultimately supersede Atomic Host as Red Hat’s immutable, container-centric operating system." Some information can also be found in this Red Hat press release.
Distribution quotes of the week
With our castor Castor now out for all to enjoy, and the Twitterverse delighted with the new minimal desktop and smooth snap integration, it’s time to turn our attention to the road ahead to 20.04 LTS, and I’m delighted to say that we’ll kick off that journey with the Cosmic Cuttlefish, soon to be known as Ubuntu 18.10.
— Mark Shuttleworth
The demise of the company's Unity desktop, which Canonical abandoned to focus on its work for server and IoT systems, comes nearly seven years after it first replaced GNOME 2. While the Unity user interface was very much a love it or hate it experience, it was (for better or worse) the thing that defined Ubuntu for nearly the past decade. You might think the end of Unity would leave Ubuntu rudderless and drifting, but I'd argue it has done just the opposite.
— Scott
Gilbertson
Development
Firefox 60 released
Mozilla has released Firefox 60. From the release notes: "Firefox 60 offers something for everyone and a little something extra for everyone who deploys Firefox in an enterprise environment. This release includes changes that give you more content and more ways to customize your New Tab/Firefox Home. It also introduces support for the Web Authentication API, which means you can log in to websites in Firefox with USB tokens like YubiKey. Firefox 60 also brings a new policy engine and Group Policy support for enterprise deployments. For more info about why and how to use Firefox in the enterprise, see this blog post."
Battle for Wesnoth 1.14 released
Version 1.14 of the Battle for WesnothAlong with the long-awaited debut on Steam, this new release series brings forth a vast number of additions and changes in all areas: a new single-player campaign, a visual and functional refresh of the multiplayer lobby and add-ons manager, a refurbished display engine, new unit graphics and animations, and much more."
Development quotes of the week
I expect that the programmers for Alexa, Cortana, Siri, and Gooda (google voice needs a name and I am horrible with names) are having to deal with this daily. A person may ask a question which literally means one thing, but has a different contextual common meaning. Giving the literal answer would not be lying, but the person asking feels the computer did. Giving the contextually correct answer has the computer lying, but the person getting the 'honest' answer they expected. [And somewhere in England, they have hooked up Babbages spinning casket to a electrical motor to produce free electricity.]
— Stephen
Smoogen
Suckless makes a window manager: a part of a computer that human beings,
with all their rich and varying abilities and perspectives, interact with
constantly. Your choices of defaults and customization options have direct
impact on those humans. [...]
— aphyr
(Thanks to Paul Wise)
With limited time and resources, you will have to make tradeoffs in your code, documentation, and community about which people your software is supportive and hostile towards. These are inherently political decisions which cannot be avoided. This is not to say that your particular choices are wrong. It’s just you are already engaged in “non-technical”, political work, because you, like everyone else here, are making a tool for human beings. [...]
There is, unfortunately, no such thing as a truly neutral stance on inclusion.
Page editor: Jake Edge
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