Brief items
Kernel development
Kernel release status
The current development kernel is 5.4-rc4, released on October 20. "This release cycle remains pretty normal. In fact, the rc's have been a bit on the smaller side of the average of the last few releases, and rc4 continues this, if only barely."
Stable updates: 5.3.7, 4.19.80, 4.14.150, 4.9.197, and 4.4.197 were released on October 18.
Distributions
Tails 4.0
Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) is, as the spelled out name implies, a privacy focused distribution, designed to run from removable media. Version 4.0 has been released. "We are especially proud to present you Tails 4.0, the first version of Tails based on Debian 10 (Buster). It brings new versions of most of the software included in Tails and some important usability and performance improvements. Tails 4.0 introduces more changes than any other version since years."
Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine) released
Ubuntu has announced the release of 19.10 "Eoan Ermine" in desktop and server editions as well as all of the different flavors: Ubuntu Budgie, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu. "The Ubuntu kernel has been updated to the 5.3 based Linux kernel, and our default toolchain has moved to gcc 9.2 with glibc 2.30. Additionally, the Raspberry Pi images now support the new Pi 4 as well as 2 and 3. Ubuntu Desktop 19.10 introduces GNOME 3.34 the fastest release yet with significant performance improvements delivering a more responsive experience. App organisation is easier with the ability to drag and drop icons into categorised folders and users can select light or dark Yaru theme variants. The Ubuntu Desktop installer also introduces installing to ZFS as a root filesystem as an experimental feature." More information can also be found in the release notes.
Distribution quote of the week
Packages are like a super saturated liquid below the freezing point.
There are 20,000+ packages and ~400 active packagers. Little events
are going to cause either tiny crystals to grow around a package (a
module of 1 package like the RHEL perl-CGI) or a giant crystal (rust
and java are probably going to grow until anything built with those
languages will have to be in the module) and it will happen very very
fast.. [much] faster than expected.. and like a crystal growth it will
have lots of faults and crack open in ways not expected also.
— Stephen
J Smoogen
Development
Bazel 1.0 released
Google has announced version 1.0 of its Bazel build system. "A growing list of Bazel users attests to the widespread demand for scalable, reproducible, and multi-lingual builds. Bazel helps Google be more open too: several large Google open source projects, such as Angular and TensorFlow, use Bazel. Users have reported 3x test time reductions and 10x faster build speeds after switching to Bazel."
Firefox 70 released
Version 70 of the Firefox web browser is out. The headline features include a new password generator and a "privacy protection report" showing users which trackers have been blocked. "Amazing user features and protections aside, we’ve also got plenty of cool additions for developers in this release. These include DOM mutation breakpoints and inactive CSS rule indicators in the DevTools, several new CSS text properties, two-value display syntax, and JS numeric separators." See the release notes for more details.
LTTng 2.11.0 "Lafontaine" released
After more than two years of development, the Linux trace toolkit next generation (LTTng) project has released version 2.11.0 of the kernel and user-space tracing tool. The release covers the LTTng tools, LTTng user-space tracer, and LTTng kernel modules. It includes a number of new features that are described in the announcement including session rotation, dynamic user-space tracing, call-stack capturing for the kernel and user space, improved networking performance, NUMA awareness for user-space tracing buffer allocation, and more. "The biggest feature of this release is the long-awaited session rotation support. Session rotations now allow you to rotate an ongoing tracing session much in the same way as you would rotate logs. The 'lttng rotate' command rotates the current trace chunk of the current tracing session. Once a rotation is completed, LTTng does not manage the trace chunk archive anymore: you can read it, modify it, move it, or remove it. Because a rotation causes the tracing session’s current sub-buffers to be flushed, trace chunk archives are never redundant, that is, they do not overlap over time, unlike snapshots. Once a rotation is complete, offline analyses can be performed on the resulting trace, much like in 'normal' mode. However, the big advantage is that this can be done without interrupting tracing, and without being limited to tools which implement the 'live' protocol."
Development quotes of the week
My theory is this: our average bus factor is one. I don't have any hard evidence to back this up, no hard research to rely on. I'd love to be proven wrong. I'd love for this to change.
— Antoine Beaupré
But unless economics of technology production change significantly in the coming decades, this problem will remain, and probably worsen, as we keep on scaffolding an entire civilization on shoulders of hobbyists that are barely aware their work is being used to power phones, cars, airplanes and hospitals.
It certainly seems that companies promote contribution to their projects as a way of getting hired: if you do enough interning or auditioning, eventually they might reward you with a position. In communications I have had, such things have been implied, suggested or even actually stated: keep up with your efforts and maybe there is an opportunity to be had.
— Paul Boddie
You don't have to be a prize-winning economist to realise that with enough people wanting to get ahead, there is little incentive for that reward to be granted. The eager brushing off of volunteer effort is also a familiar story in the Free Software realm amongst organisations and projects alike.
Miscellaneous
GNOME's patent-troll counterattack
Rothschild Patent Imaging LLC filed a patent suit against the GNOME Foundation in September, asserting a violation in the Shotwell photo manager. GNOME has now gone on the counterattack, questioning the validity of the patent and whether it applies to Shotwell at all. There is also an unspecified counterclaim to strike back against Rothschild. "We want to send a message to all software patent trolls out there — we will fight your suit, we will win, and we will have your patent invalidated. To do this, we need your help."
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