Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 5.19-rc5, released on July 3. Linus said: "So everything looks ok - we certainly have some issues still being looked at, but on the whole 5.19 looks normal, and nothing particularly bad seems to be going on".

Stable updates: 5.18.9, 5.15.52, 5.10.128, 5.4.203, 4.19.250, 4.14.286, and 4.9.321 were released on July 2. The 5.18.10, 5.15.53, 5.10.129, 5.4.204, 4.19.251, 4.14.287, and 4.9.322 updates are in the review process; they are due on July 7.

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Debian 9 Long Term Support reaching end-of-life

The Debian Long Term Support (LTS) team has announced that Debian 9 ("stretch") has "reached its end-of-life on July 1, 2022, five years after its initial release on June 17, 2017". There will be further updates for a subset of the packages in the release through the Extended LTS project. Meanwhile, the LTS team is moving on to Debian 10 ("buster"):

The LTS Team will prepare the transition to Debian 10 buster, which is the current oldstable release. The LTS team will take over support from the Security Team during August, while the final point update for buster will be released during that month.

Debian 10 will also receive Long Term Support for five years after its initial release with support ending on June 30, 2024. The supported architectures will be announced at a later date.

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Distributions quote of the week

After installing or upgrading your Fedora or RHEL system, you have to accept a "do you trust this official Fedora project key" prompt or you cannot install packages from the official repos. So all our users have been trained to ignore warnings about untrusted packages because it's mandatory to do so. If few users think twice about accepting a key as long as it purports to be from "Fedora" or "Red Hat"... well, the whole system is subverted. This needs a rethink.

— Michael Catanzaro

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Darktable 4.0.0 released

Version 4.0.0 of the darktable raw photo editor has been released. "The UI has been completely revamped again to improve look and consistency. Padding, margins, color, contrast, alignment, and icons have been reworked throughout". Other changes include new exposure and color-calibration modules, a reworked "filmic" color-mapping module, guided laplacian highlight reconstruction, and more. (LWN looked at darktable in January).

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Rust 1.62.0 released

Version 1.62.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include a new cargo add command, default enum variants, an improved Linux mutex implementation, a number of stabilized APIs, and more.

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Amazon's CodeWhisperer

There has been a fair amount of concern recently about Microsoft's Copilot system, which many see as possibly putting its users in violation of free-software licenses. But, naturally, Copilot is not the only offering of this type; Amazon has put out a preview version of "CodeWhisperer", which is also a machine-learning-based coding tool that was trained on (unspecified) open-source code. From the FAQ:

CodeWhisperer’s reference tracker detects whether a code recommendation may be similar to particular CodeWhisperer training data, and can provide those references to you. This allows you to easily find and review that reference code and how it is used in the context of another project.

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Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has issued a strong call for free software projects to give up GitHub and to move their repositories elsewhere. There are a number of problems that SFC has identified with the GitHub code-hosting service and, in particular, with its Copilot AI-based code-writing tool that was trained on the community's code stored in the company's repositories. Moving away from GitHub will not be easy, SFC said, but it is important to do so lest the free-software community repeat the SourceForge mistake.

Specifically, we at Software Freedom Conservancy have been actively communicating with Microsoft and their GitHub subsidiary about our concerns with "Copilot" since they first launched it almost exactly a year ago. Our initial video chat call (in July 2021) with Microsoft and GitHub representatives resulted in several questions which they said they could not answer at that time, but would "answer soon". [...] Last week, after we reminded GitHub of (a) the pending questions that we'd waited a year for them to answer and (b) of their refusal to join public discussion on the topic, they responded a week later, saying they would not join any public nor private discussion on this matter because "a broader conversation [about the ethics of AI-assisted software] seemed unlikely to alter your [SFC's] stance, which is why we [GitHub] have not responded to your [SFC's] detailed questions". In other words, GitHub's final position on Copilot is: if you disagree with GitHub about policy matters related to Copilot, then you don't deserve a reply from Microsoft or GitHub. They only will bother to reply if they think they can immediately change your policy position to theirs. But, Microsoft and GitHub will leave you hanging for a year before they'll tell you that!

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