Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.8-rc3, released on February 4. Linus said: "A slightly larger rc3 that I'd have hoped for, although at this stage in the release process it's not something that really worries me yet."

Stable updates: 6.7.3, 6.6.15, and 6.1.76 were released on January 31, followed by 6.7.4, 6.6.16, and 6.1.77 on February 5.

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Quotes of the week

Funny enough, the main objection a lot of kernel maintainers have to forges is that it makes it really hard to find relevant discussions once the volume goes above a certain threshold. These folks have become *extremely* efficient at querying and filtering the mailing list traffic, to the point where all they ever see are just those discussions relevant to their work. They love the fact that it all arrives into the same place (their inbox) without having to go and click on various websites, each with their own login information, UI, and preferred workflow.

The kernel maintainers are able to review tens of thousands of patches monthly with only about a hundred or so top maintainers. To them, this system is working great, especially now that some tools allow easy ways to query, retrieve, verify, and apply patches (shameless plug for lore, lei, and b4 here).

The obvious problem, of course, is that these folks are FOSS's "marathon runners" who got really good at their workflow, but the situation is different for anyone else who is just starting out.

— Konstantin Ryabitsev

As an outsider, Linux development is really strange:

Two sub-features are being pushed very hard, and the primary developer doesn't have code which uses either of them. And once it goes in, it cannot be changed.

It's very different from my world, where the absolutely minimal interface was written to apply to a whole operating system plus 10,000+ applications, and then took months of testing before it was approved for inclusion. And if it was subtly wrong, we would be able to change it.

— Theo de Raadt

Comments (64 posted)

Damn Small Linux 2024 released

A new version of the Damn Small Linux distribution has come out with an updated definition of "damn small":

The new goal of DSL is to pack as much usable desktop distribution into an image small enough to fit on a single CD, or a hard limit of 700MB. This project is meant to service older computers and have them continue to be useful far into the future. Such a notion sits well with my values. I think of this project as my way of keeping otherwise usable hardware out of landfills.

Comments (7 posted)

Go 1.22 released

Go 1.22, the most recent version of the Go programming language, has been released. It comes with two language changes to for loops: a fix for a longstanding "gotcha" with accidentally sharing loop variables between iterations and adding the ability to range over integer values. There are also additions to the standard library, improved performance, and more. See the release notes for further information.

Comments (33 posted)

Development quote of the week

Wayland and X.org are both part of freedesktop. Whatever maintenance is still happening on X.org is mostly being done by people who primarily work on Wayland. There isn't some kind of holy war going on between The Wayland Developers who want to kill X.org, and The X.org Developers who believe it is great and want to keep it. They're nearly all the same people, and they all want X.org to die.

— Adam Williamson

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Phipps: The European regulators listened to the Open Source communities

Simon Phipps writes on the Open Source Initiative blog that the latest version of the European Cyber Resilience Act is much improved: "As a result of all this effort from so many people, the final text of the CRA mitigated pretty much all the risks we had identified to individual developers and to Open Source foundations."

Comments (49 posted)