Brief items

Security quote of the week

But there's one depravity that no printer company has managed: putting DRM in paper. Oh, not for lack of will! But adding DRM to paper is hard, because paper is…well, it's paper. Pressed sheets of vegetable pulp. It's hard to put a cop-chip in a sheet of paper.

But what about a roll of paper?

See where this is going?

— Cory Doctorow on Dymo's new DRMed rolls of labels

Comments (2 posted)

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 5.17-rc4, released on February 13. "Things continue to look pretty normal for 5.17. Both the diffstat and the number of commits looks pretty much average for an rc4 release." The code name for the release has been changed to "Superb Owl".

Stable updates: the small 5.16.9, 5.15.23, 5.10.100, 5.4.179, 4.19.229, 4.14.266, and 4.9.301 updates were released on February 11, followed by the (larger) 5.16.10, 5.15.24, 5.10.101, 5.4.180, 4.19.230, 4.14.267, and 4.9.302 updates on February 16.

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Opdenacker: Using Device Tree Overlays, example on BeagleBone boards

Over on the Bootlin blog, Michael Opdenacker has an introduction to using device tree overlays to support changes to the standard device tree definition for a particular system-on-chip (SoC). This allows users to add new hardware or modify the hardware configuration for their system relatively easily—and without recompiling the kernel or the full device tree source files.

For a given CPU architecture (ARM, PowerPC, etc), such a description allows to have a unique kernel supporting many different systems with distinct Systems on a Chip. The compiled Device Tree (DTB: Device Tree Binary), passed to the kernel by the bootloader at boot time, lets the kernel know which SoC and devices to initialize. Therefore, when you create a new board, and want to use a standard GNU/Linux distribution on it, all you have to do is create a new Device Tree describing your new hardware, compile it, and boot the distribution’s kernel with it. You don’t need to recompile that kernel, at least when it supports your SoC and the devices on your board.

[...] However, this is still an inconvenient solution. Any time you plug in a new device or an expansion board, or want to tweak other settings, you have to rebuild and update the full Device Tree for your board. What if you could prepare Device Tree fragments for each change to make, compile them once for all, and then, when you boot your device, load the main Device Tree and only the fragments you need, without having anything else to recompile?

Comments (3 posted)

Quote of the week

Churn is kind of the whole point of staging. Generally, churn is a net positive for any subsystem. It's good to get eyes on the code.

— Dan Carpenter

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Distributions quote of the week

The contributions coming in for CentOS Stream, particularly Stream 9, have been fantastic. This is the kind of feedback loop we are trying to build, and the willingness to jump in headfirst from the community even though we still have some bumpy spots in workflow and guidance is much appreciated.

— Josh Boyer

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McGovern: Handing over

Neil McGovern announces his departure from the helm of the GNOME Foundation.

GNOME has changed a lot in the last 5 years, and a lot has happened in that time. As a Foundation, we’ve gone from a small team of 3, to employing people to work on marketing, investment in technical frameworks, conference organisation and much more beyond. We’ve become the default desktop on all major Linux distributions. We’ve launched Flathub to help connect application developers directly to their users. We’ve dealt with patent suits, trademarks, and bylaw changes. We’ve moved our entire development platform to GitLab. We released 10 new GNOME releases, GTK 4 and GNOME 40.

Comments (68 posted)

Mozilla on the coming version-100 apocalypse

Both Firefox and Chrome are racing toward releasing version 100 in the near future, and developers for both browsers are worried that web sites with naive code to parse the version number out of the user-agent string will break.

Every strategy that adds complexity to the User-Agent string has a strong impact on the ecosystem. Let’s work together to avoid yet another quirky behavior. In Chrome and Firefox Nightly, you can configure the browser to report the version as 100 right now and report any issues you come across.

Comments (48 posted)

Development quotes of the week - regular expression edition

I *thought* I had a reasonable understanding of regexes, and now I have learned that I don't, and that the regexes I've been writing don't do what I thought they did, and presumably the only reason they haven't blown up in my face (either performance-wise, or the wrong output) is blind luck.

Now I have *three* problems.

— Steven D'Aprano

Pretending that a regex matches in a simpler way than it actually does is like pretending that the earth is a sphere: technically wrong, but almost always close enough.

— Chris Angelico

Comments (7 posted)

Lorinda Cherry RIP

Longtime Unix developer Lorinda Cherry passed away recently; among other things, she was the creator of the dc and bc utilities still in use today. See this posting from Douglas McIlroy for many more details on her life.

Comments (7 posted)