Brief items

Kernel development

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 5.5-rc7, released on January 19. Linus is still unsure whether the final 5.5 release will come out next week or not: "if it looks like there's pent-up fixes pending next week, I'll make another rc".

Stable updates: 5.4.13, 4.19.97, and 4.14.166 were released on January 18. The 5.4.14, 4.19.98, 4.14.167, 4.9.211, and 4.4.211 updates are in the review process; they are due on January 24.

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Quote of the week

One of my clients is responsible for several of the world's top 100 pension funds.

They had a nightly batch job that computed the required contributions, made from projections 20 years into the future.

It crashed on January 19, 2018 — 20 years before Y2038.

— John Feminella recounts his discovery of the year-2038 problem

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Distributions

Fedora CoreOS out of preview (Fedora Magazine)

Fedora Magazine reports that the Fedora CoreOS distribution is now deemed ready for use. "Fedora CoreOS is a new Fedora Edition built specifically for running containerized workloads securely and at scale. It’s the successor to both Fedora Atomic Host and CoreOS Container Linux and is part of our effort to explore new ways of assembling and updating an OS. Fedora CoreOS combines the provisioning tools and automatic update model of Container Linux with the packaging technology, OCI support, and SELinux security of Atomic Host."

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Distribution quote of the week

We are a community. Building a great free software operating system brings us together. But we care about each other, and we like to learn and work together. Whenever we manage to show that, we are stronger.

— Sam Hartman

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Development

GNU Guile 3.0.0 released

Version 3.0.0 of the Guile implementation of the Scheme programming language has been released. There's a lot of work here, including a new, lower-level byte code implementation, interleaved internal definitions, a new exception implementation, and much more. "Guile programs now run up to 4 times faster, relative to Guile 2.2, thanks to just-in-time (JIT) native code generation. Notably, this brings the performance of "eval" as written in Scheme back to the level of 'eval' written in C, as in the days of Guile 1.8."

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GNU make 4.3 released

GNU make 4.3 is out. New features include explicit grouped targets, a new .EXTRA_PREREQS variable, the ability to specify parallel builds in the makefile itself, and more. There are also a couple of backward-incompatible changes; see the announcement for details.

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Roose: PHP in 2020

Brent Roose argues that it is time to take another look at PHP. "In this post, I want to look at this bright side of PHP development. I want to show you that, despite its many shortcomings, PHP is a worthwhile language to learn. I want you to know that the PHP 5 era is coming to an end. That, if you want to, you can write modern and clean PHP code, and leave behind much of the mess it was 10 years ago."

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Wine 5.0 released

Wine 5.0 has been released. The main highlights are builtin modules in PE format, multi-monitor support, XAudio2 reimplementation, and Vulkan 1.1 support. Wine is capable of running Windows applications on Linux and other POSIX-compliant systems.

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Development quotes of the week

It's been very clear from the beginning that the Rust project saw Rust as more than just the language. The community and the people mattered. From the earliest days, leadership explicitly took the position that it wasn't just the code, but the people around the project were important. Of course, people are also people, and so this wasn't perfect; we've made several fairly large mis-steps here over the years. But Rust has been an experiment in community building as much as an experiment in language building.

— Steve Klabnik

The free software community tends to celebrate custom, hacky solutions to problems as something positive ("It's so flexible!"), even when these hacks are only necessary because things are broken by default. It's nice that people with a lot of time and technical skills can fix their own problems, but the benefits from that don't automatically trickle down to everybody else.

— Tobias Bernard (Thanks to Paul Wise)

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