Brief items
Kernel development
Kernel release status
The current development kernel is 5.7-rc2, released on April 19. Linus said: "Everything continues to look fairly normal, with commit counts right in the middle of what you'd expect for rc2. And most of the changes are tiny and don't look scary at all."
Stable updates: 5.6.5, 5.5.18, 5.4.33, and 4.19.116 came out on April 17, followed by 5.6.6, 5.5.19, 5.4.34, and 4.19.117 on April 21. The 5.5.x line ends with 5.5.19, so users will want to be looking at moving forward to 5.6.
The 5.6.7, 5.4.35 4.19.118, 4.14.177, 4.9.220, and 4.4.220 updates are in the review process; they are due on April 24.
Garrett: Linux kernel lockdown, integrity, and confidentiality
Matthew Garrett has posted an overview of the kernel lockdown capability merged in 5.4. "If you verify your boot chain but allow root to modify that kernel, the benefits of the verified boot chain are significantly reduced. Even if root can't modify the on-disk kernel, root can just hot-patch the kernel and then make this persistent by dropping a binary that repeats the process on system boot. Lockdown is intended as a mechanism to avoid that, by providing an optional policy that closes off interfaces that allow root to modify the kernel."
Distributions
Debian Project Leader Election 2020 Results
The results are in from this year's Debian project leader election; the winner is Jonathan Carter.Yocto Project 3.1 LTS (Dunfell 23.0.0)
The Yocto Project has announced its 3.1 LTS release of its distribution-building system. Changes include a 5.4 kernel, the removal of all Python 2 code, improvements in the build equivalence mechanism (described in this article), and more.Distribution quotes of the week
Respect also means recognizing that some decisions may not affect you and
thus may not be about you. Perhaps Discourse won't be a good solution for
debian-project or debian-vote as Neil was hoping, but perhaps it's the
*perfect* solution for some packaging team of which you are not even a
part, and whose mailing list you never interact with. Maybe they'll move
to Discourse and you'll *never notice*, because it doesn't concern you,
and they'll be very happy. Drowning the project in negativity right now
could prevent that sort of discovery from happening.
— Russ Allbery
For many reasons, including those above, I believe that the
Debian project is more important and relevant now than it's
ever been before. The world needs a free, general purpose
operating system, unburdened by the needs of profit, which puts
the needs of its users first, providing a safe and secure
platform for the computing needs of the masses.
— Jonathan Carter
Development
Python 2.7.18, the end of an era
Python 2.7.18 is out. This is the last release and end of support for Python 2. "Python 2.7 has been under active development since the release of Python 2.6, more than 11 years ago. Over all those years, CPython's core developers and contributors sedulously applied bug fixes to the 2.7 branch, no small task as the Python 2 and 3 branches diverged. There were large changes midway through Python 2.7's life such as PEP 466's feature backports to the ssl module and hash randomization. Traditionally, these features would never have been added to a branch in maintenance mode, but exceptions were made to keep Python 2 users secure. Thank you to CPython's community for such dedication."
Development quotes of the week
Python 2.7.18 is a special release. I refer, of course, to the fact that
"2.7.18" is the closest any Python version number will ever approximate e,
Euler's number. Simply exquisite!
— Python 2.7.18 release announcement
[...] Users still on Python 2 can use e to compute the instantaneously compounding interest on their technical debt.
If Emacs were 100% as convenient and attractive as other editors,
it is possible that a lot of users would use it. 30 years ago, the
user profile of Emacs was much broader than it is today. It would
be good to make this happen again.
— Richard
Stallman
But that would require a number of changes, and I don't think that round corners would get us close to there.
Miscellaneous
How to livestream a conference in just under a week (FSF)
On the FSF blog, Zoe Kooyman describes how the LibrePlanet 2020 conference was converted to a virtual conference in a week's time—using free software, naturally. "In 2016, we gained some livestreaming experience when we interviewed Edward Snowden live from Moscow. To minimize the risk of failed recordings due to overly complex or error-prone software systems, we made it a priority to achieve a pipeline with low latency, good image quality, and low CPU usage. The application we used then was Jitsi Meet, and the tech info and scripts we used for streaming from 2016 are available for your information and inspiration. Naturally, for this year, with no time for researching other applications, we opted to build on our experience with Jitsi Meet. We hosted our own instance for remote speakers to connect to and enter a video call with the conference organizers. A screen capture of this call was then simultaneously recorded by the FSF tech team, and streamed out to the world via Gstreamer and Icecast."
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