Brief items
Security
Huston: Calling Time on DNSSEC?
Geoff Huston suggests that it is time to give up on DNSSEC and look for a better way to secure the Internet namespace.
What appears to be very clear (to me at any rate!) is that DNSSEC as we know it today is just not going anywhere. It's too complex, too fragile and just too slow to use for the majority of services and their users. Some value its benefits highly enough that they are prepared to live with its shortcomings, but that's not the case for the overall majority of name holders and for the majority of users, and no amount of passionate exhortations about DNSSEC will change this.
Kernel development
Kernel release status
The current development kernel is 6.10-rc1, released on May 26. For reasons that have not been spelled out, the codename for the release has been changed to "Baby Opossum Posse". See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) for an overview of the changes merged for 6.10.Stable updates: 6.9.2, 6.8.11, 6.6.32, 6.1.92, 5.15.160, 5.10.218, 5.4.277, and 4.19.315 were all released on May 25.
The 6.9.3 and 6.8.12 stable updates are in the review process; they are due at any time.
BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog)
This Graphite blog post retells the history of the BitKeeper fiasco and the dawn of the Git era.
When we think of history, we often romanticize it as being born of a sudden stroke of inspiration. But the creation of git shows the far harsher reality of invention: a slowly escalating disagreement over a license; the need for a scrappy backup solution to unblock work; and then continued polishing and iteration through years and years, led not by the inventor, but rather a community.
For those who weren't around in those days, a perusal of the LWN coverage from the time might be of interest too, including:
- Our first mention of BitKeeper in October 1998
- Not quite open source, 1999
- Linus tries out BitKeeper, 2002
- The free software community and proprietary packages, 2002
- The kernel and BitKeeper part ways, 2005
- How Tridge reverse engineered BitKeeper, 2005
- The guts of Git, 2005
...and a lot more for those who care to search for it.
Quote of the week
The whole "one step forward, two steps back" is absolutely fine if you are line dancing.
But we're not line dancing.
We take it slow and steady, and if you can't fix something without breaking something else, then that thing simply does not get fixed.
Distributions
Results from the 2024 FreeBSD Community Survey Report
The FreeBSD Foundation has announced the 2024 FreeBSD Community Survey Report. The report provides a summary of 1,446 responses to an anonymous online survey of FreeBSD users. It provides insights into user profiles, typical usage, how the FreeBSD project is viewed, as well as recommendations for expanding the FreeBSD community and contributor base:
Currently fewer than half of users consider FreeBSD their daily driver; Individuals are less likely than Corporate Users to consider FreeBSD primary. The barrier seems to be less about software and more about hardware support, particularly around Wi-Fi drivers (which are at the top of the wish list for the Foundation to focus on in the coming year). A relatively high number of those who don't consider FreeBSD their main OS say they would consider doing so with hardware support for desktops and laptops that was equivalent to Linux.
The raw data for the survey is available as well.
Distribution quote of the week
A very very long time ago, I helped set up the filename structure for downloads that Fedora uses now of `/pub/fedora/linux` when I set up the 'new' Red Hat Linux download structure for mirrors in 2000. The reason was that I figured that at some point we might expand to Hurd, a BSD, or other items as products might grow. When Fedora set up its file structure around 2003, this naming structure was kept and has been around for the last 20 years. In that time, it has been proposed multiple times that `we should do a <fill in the blank distro>`, but no one has actually done the work to make it happen.
It takes a LOT more than just proposing something on a mailing list to make a new port or release work. It takes a lot of hard work to first learn how the other operating system works, how it compiles, can the tools which make an operating system 'Fedora' be ported to that tool, and it then takes the work of making those things happen more than once. At that point, it takes a lot of ground effort to figure out how much of the software in the Fedora ecosystem can be compiled for the new operating system and will actually work in it. [...]
Which I think is why after 24 years, there isn't any other base kernel under /pub/fedora/ than linux. Just getting a port to a new architecture takes anywhere from 5-10 people multiple years to make a stable and repeatable release cycle. These are people who have worked in Linux for a long time and have experience with the many tools which 'make Fedora' with previous porting efforts. It would take people who have been running HURD in some way to know what it does and know how to make things like rpm, mock, dnf work on a different fundamental architecture (Micro kernel based versus unikernel).
I wish the people who are interested in it as much luck as I can give.
Development
KDE Gear 24.05.0
The KDE Project has announced the release of KDE Gear 24.05.0, with new features and updates for the more than 200 applications that are part of the project. In addition to new versions of the Dolphin file manager, Kdenlive video editor, and Elisa music player, this release includes five applications new to KDE Gear: the Audex CD-ripper application, an application Accessibility Inspector, the Francis Pomodoro timer, Kalm to teach breathing techniques, and a Sokoban-like game called Skladnik. See the full changelog for a complete list of changes.
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