Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.3-rc2, released on March 12. Linus said:

This one looks fairly normal, although if you look at the diffs, they are dominated by the removal of a staging driver (r8188eu) that has been superceded by a proper driver. That removal itself is 90% of the diffs. But if you filter that out, it all looks normal

Stable updates have not been in short supply; they also have not all been particularly stable. The huge 6.2.3, 6.1.16, and 5.15.99 updates started things off on March 10. 6.2.4 and 6.1.17 followed one day later with fixes, then 6.2.5, 6.1.18, and 5.15.100 showed up with more fixes the same day. The large 5.10.173, 5.4.235, 4.19.276, and 4.14.308 updates also came out on the 11th and, to cap things off, 5.15.101 brought another revert. The 6.2.6, 6.1.19, 5.15.102, 5.10.174, 5.4.236, 4.19.277, and 4.14.309 updates all came out on March 13.

In case that's not enough, the 6.2.7, 6.1.20, 5.15.103, 5.10.175, 5.4.237, 4.19.278, and 4.14.310 updates are all in the review process; they are due on March 17.

Unsurprisingly, all of this churn has restarted the recurring conversation on stable-kernel stability. Little new has been said this time around; the curious can peruse the latest thread for details.

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Quote of the week

As a user of -stable kernels, I consider that they've got much better over the last years. A lot of processes have improved everywhere even before the release, but I do think that autosel is part of what generally gives a chance to some useful and desired fixed (e.g. in drivers) to be backported and save some users unneeded headaches.

— Willy Tarreau

We're in the process of going away from 6 year kernels which will in turn lessen the number of parallel trees we support.

— Stable kernel maintainer Sasha Levin

You get a stable kernel release, and you get a stable kernel release, and you get a stable kernel release!

Hopefully things now settle down to the normal constant crazy pace we are used to (1-2 releases a week), instead of the mass of releases we had in the past few days.

— Stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman

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Debian project leader elections 2023

The 2023 election for the Debian project leader looks to be a relatively unexciting affair: incumbent leader Jonathan Carter is running unopposed for a fourth term. His platform lays out his hopes and plans for that term.

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Git 2.40.0 released

Version 2.40.0 of the Git source-code management system is out. Changes include a new --merge-base option for merges, a built-in implementation of bisection, Emacs support for git jump, a fair number of smallish user-interface tweaks, and a lot of bug fixes. See the announcement and this GitHub blog entry for the details.

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The suspension of ipmitool

It would appear that the ipmitool repository has been locked, and its maintainer suspended, by GitHub. This Hacker News conversation delves into the reason; evidently the developer was employed by a sanctioned Russian company. Ipmitool remains available and will, presumably, find a new home eventually. (Thanks to Paul Wise).

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Rust 1.68.0 released

Version 1.68.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include the stabilization of the "sparse" Cargo protocol, the ability for (some) applications to recover from memory-allocation failures, and "local Pin construction":

The new pin! macro constructs a Pin<&mut T> from a T expression, anonymously captured in local state. This is often called stack-pinning, but that "stack" could also be the captured state of an async fn or block.

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