Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 5.18-rc5, released on May 1. Linus said: "So if rc4 last week was tiny and smaller than usual, it seems to have been partly timing, and rc5 is now a bit larger than usual. But only a very tiny bit larger - certainly not outrageously so, and not something that worries me."

Stable updates: 5.15.37 and 4.19.241 were released on May 1.

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Fedora project leader Matthew Miller weighs in (TechRepublic)

TechRepublic has published an interview with Fedora project leader Matthew Miller.

Basically, every modern language provides a lot of building blocks that usually come from other smaller open-source projects. These are libraries, and they do things like format text, handle images, connect to databases and deal with talking across the internet. Projects like Fedora or Debian used to work to try to package up every such library in our own format, made to work nicely with everything else.

Now, every new language — Rust, for example — comes with its own tools to manage these, and they don’t work nicely together with our old way. The sheer scale is overwhelming — for Rust alone, as I checked just now there are 81,541 such libraries. We can’t keep up with repackaging all of that into our own format, let alone that plus all of the other languages. We need to approach this differently in order to still provide a good solution to software developers.

I think a lot of that will need machine learning and automation … we’ll need to keep adjusting so we can provide the value that Linux distributions give users in trust, security and coherent integration at an exponential scale.

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Distributions quotes of the week

I think the primary issue is that the crafting of binary packages is 'fairly' manual. Someone has to put the src.rpm in the meat grinder (koji) in the right order with the right spices (flags) to make the sausage at the other end. We rely on the cook to remember how they did it the last 10 times and that the taster (functional and ci) says it works. This normally works well but then it turns out that something swapped out somewhere and once 'fully cooked' (composed) that the sausage explodes.

— Stephen Smoogen

Stable releases of core components of a major desktop should never contain bugs like "deleting contacts sometimes doesn't work" or "you can't add photos to an album in the Photos application because the dialog where you're supposed to do it is completely broken and the list entries multiply like rabbits who've been dosed up on viagra". Distribution validation testing is not *for* finding bugs like this.

— Adam Williamson

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Firefox 100 released

Version 100.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. New features include video caption display on various proprietary sites, multiple-language spelling checking, invisible scrollbars, and more.

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Hughes: fwupd 1.8.0 and 50 million updates

Richard Hughes announces the fwupd 1.8.0 release and notes that the associated Linux Vendor Firmware Service has now shipped a minimum of 50 million firmware updates.

Just 7 years ago Christian asked me to “make firmware updates work on Linux” and now we have a thriving client project that respects both your freedom and your privacy, and a thriving ecosystem of hardware vendors who consider Linux users first class citizens. Of course, there are vendors who are not shipping updates for popular hardware, but they’re now in the minority — and every month we have two or three new vendor account requests.

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DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Drew DeVault has announced the existence of a new programming language called "Hare".

Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. Hare uses a static type system, manual memory management, and a minimal runtime. It is well-suited to writing operating systems, system tools, compilers, networking software, and other low-level, high performance tasks.

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SystemTap 4.7 released

Version 4.7 of the SystemTap tracing system is out. "Enhancements to this release include: a new stap-profile-annotate tool, a new --sign-module module signing option, -d is now implied for processes specified with -c/-x".

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Willis: Engaging with the OSI Elections 2022.1

Nathan Willis took a long look at the Open Source Initiative's 2022 board election and wasn't entirely pleased with what he saw.

So it’s a troubling ballot to look at. There’s an ostensibly non-profit organization that’s an official OSI affiliate trying to run its CEO as an individual candidate while also running a second member (a board director) on the appropriate, affiliate ballot in the same election. There’s also two financial sponsors running candidates on the individual ballot, one of them (Red Hat) running two candidates at the same time for the two open seats.

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