Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 5.19-rc4, released on June 26.

So we've had a couple of fairly small rc releases, and here we finally start to see an uptick in commits in rc4. Not what I really want to see in the middle of the release cycle, but not entirely surprising considering how quiet it's been so far.

Stable updates: 5.18.7, 5.15.50, 5.10.125, 5.4.201, 4.19.249, 4.14.285, and 4.9.320 were released on June 25. The 5.x updates are relatively small, but the 4.x updates contain a fair number of backported random-number-generator improvements along with the usual fixes. 5.10.126 came out shortly thereafter with a single regression fix. Then 5.18.8, 5.15.51, 5.10.127, and 5.4.202 were released on June 29.

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Ojeda: Memory Safety for the World’s Largest Software Project

Miguel Ojeda has posted an update on the Rust-for-Linux project.

This second year since the RFC we are looking forward to several milestones which hopefully we will achieve:

• More users or use cases inside the kernel, including example drivers – this is pretty important to get merged into the kernel.
• Splitting the kernel crate and managing dependencies to allow better development.
• Extending the current integration of the kernel documentation, testing and other tools.
• Getting more subsystem maintainers, companies and researchers involved.
• Seeing most of the remaining Rust features stabilized.
• Possibly being able to start compiling the Rust code in the kernel with GCC.
• And, of course, getting merged into the mainline kernel, which should make everything else easier!

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Quote of the week

I haven't really gotten the hang of reading rust without a google window open to figure things out, but I think that's just a "you have to get used to it".

Or, alternatively, you have to just ignore the rust parts.

As I mentioned at OSS NA last week - it's not like most people can read our MM code either - even when you know C, some of that code is pretty incomprehensible unless you know how it all works.

If people can be productive kernel developers without understanding the MM layer, I'm sure people can be kernel developers without understanding rust.

— Linus Torvalds

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Distributions quote of the week

Yes, openSUSE had problems producing regular releases for years due to lack of contributions. Yes these problems were known, publicly announced, and efforts made to rectify them over years. These efforts failed, and the patience of the remaining regular release builders ran out after 13.2

Leap was thrown in to plug the gap for our users who had not followed our (many and still growing) contributor base to Tumbleweed.

Leap was initially designed to be very open to contributions that would diverge from SLE. Few of these contributions came, so Closing the Leap Gap was the result, and Leap is now less open to such contributions. [...]

I really think Leap (like any conventional regular release) is a lost cause now in 2022.

— Richard Brown

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Collabora Online developer edition 22.05 released

CODE 22.05 has been released; this is the "developer edition" of the Collabora Online offering formerly known as LibreOffice Online.

CODE 22.05 is preceding the next major release of our long-term supported business suite Collabora Online. This free developer version includes all features and enhancements that will be available in our enterprise version, expected later in July. The CODE releases allow every interested user to learn and test new features on an early stage.

New features include support for external grammar checkers, the ability to have 16,000 columns in a spreadsheet (which is evidently useful to somebody), sparkline plots, support for WebP graphics, and more.

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Firefox 102.0 released

Version 102.0 of the Firefox browser is out. Changes include the ability to disable the panel that otherwise materializes on every download and the stripping of certain query parameters in extended tracking protection mode. The stripping will be the default for private browsing in the next release.

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Git 2.37.0 released

Version 2.37.0 of the Git source-code management system has been released. Highlights include a new object-pruning mechanism called "cruft packs", full integration of the sparse index, and more; see this GitHub blog post for more information.

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KDE Apps Mid-Year Update (KDE.news)

Here's an update on recent KDE application development on KDE.news:

KStars is probably the most feature-rich free astronomy software around and the 3.5.9 release adds some exciting new features. HiPS (Hierarchical Progressive Surveys) is a technology that provides progressive high resolution images of the sky at different zoom levels. KStars fully supports online HiPS where data is downloaded from online servers and cached to be displayed on the Sky Map.

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A Rust-in-GCC update

Philip Herron has posted an update on the status of the GCC front-end compiler for the Rust language.

For some context, my current project plan brings us to November 2022 where we (unexpected events permitting) should be able to support valid Rust code targeting Rustc version ~1.40 and reuse libcore, liballoc and libstd. This date does not account for the borrow checker feature and the proc macro crate, which we have a plan to implement, but this will be a further six-month project.

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Thunderbird 102 released

Version 102 of the Thunderbird email client has been released.

It features refreshed icons, color folders, and quality-of-life upgrades like the redesigned message header. It ushers in a brand new Address Book to bring you closer than ever to the people you communicate with. Plus useful new tools to help you manage your data, navigate the app faster, and boost your productivity. We’re even bringing Matrix to the party.

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Vim 9.0 released

Version 9.0 of the Vim text editor has been released. The biggest change would appear to be the addition of the "Vim9 Script" language for editor customization:

The main goal of Vim9 script is to drastically improve performance. This is accomplished by compiling commands into instructions that can be efficiently executed. An increase in execution speed of 10 to 100 times can be expected. A secondary goal is to avoid Vim-specific constructs and get closer to commonly used programming languages, such as JavaScript, TypeScript and Java.

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DeVault: GitHub Copilot and open source laundering

Drew DeVault takes issue with GitHub's "Copilot" offering and the licensing issues that it raises:

GitHub’s Copilot is trained on software governed by these terms, and it fails to uphold them, and enables customers to accidentally fail to uphold these terms themselves. Some argue about the risks of a “copyleft surprise”, wherein someone incorporates a GPL licensed work into their product and is surprised to find that they are obligated to release their product under the terms of the GPL as well. Copilot institutionalizes this risk and any user who wishes to use it to develop non-free software would be well-advised not to do so, else they may find themselves legally liable to uphold these terms, perhaps ultimately being required to release their works under the terms of a license which is undesirable for their goals.

Chances are that many people will disagree with DeVault's reasoning, but this is an issue that merits some discussion still.

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