Linux Weekly News

There are many different Python web frameworks, from nano-frameworks all the way up to the full-stack variety. One that recently caught my eye is Microdot, the "impossibly small web framework for Python and MicroPython"; since it targets MicroPython, it is plausible for running the user interface of an "internet of things" (IoT) device, for example. Beyond that, it is Flask-inspired, which should make it reasonably familiar to many potential web developers.

Version 122.0 of the Firefox browser is out. Changes include improved search suggestions, improvements to the in-browser translation feature, better line-breaking compatibility, and a shiny new .deb package.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (kodi and squid), Fedora (ansible-core, java-latest-openjdk, mingw-python-jinja2, openssh, and pgadmin4), Gentoo (Apache XML-RPC), Red Hat (gnutls and xorg-x11-server), Slackware (postfix), SUSE (bluez and openssl-3), and Ubuntu (gnutls28, libssh, and squid).

Linus Torvalds was able to release 6.8-rc1 and close the 6.8 merge window on time despite losing power to his home for most of a week. He noted that this merge window is "maybe a bit smaller than usual", but 12,239 non-merge changesets found their way into the mainline, so it's not that small. About 8,000 of those changes were merged since the first-half summary was written; the second half saw a lot of device-driver updates, but there were other interesting changes as well.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (keystone and subunit), Fedora (dotnet6.0, golang, kernel, sos, and tigervnc), Mageia (erlang), Red Hat (openssl), SUSE (bluez, python-aiohttp, and seamonkey), and Ubuntu (postfix and xorg-server).

The 6.8-rc1 kernel prepatch is out for testing.

So this wasn't the most pleasant merge window, but most of the unpleasantness was entirely unrelated to the code base and almost entirely related to nasty weather. Just a few technical hiccups. And after a very big 6.7 release, 6.8 looks to actually be smaller than average, although not really all that significantly so.

The 6.7.1, 6.6.13, and 6.1.74 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

SourceHut has published a post-mortem of its outage earlier this month. The post-mortem covers the causes of the outage and what steps SourceHut took to mitigate it, ending by saying:

As unfortunate as these events were, we welcome opportunities to stress-test our emergency procedures; we found them to be compatible with our objectives for the alpha and we learned a lot of ways to improve our reliability further for the future. We are going to continue working on our post-incident tasks, building up our infrastructure’s resilience, reliability, and scalability as planned. Once we address the high-priority tasks, though, our first order of business in the immediate future will be to get some rest.

Jujutsu is a Git-compatible distributed version control system originally started as a hobby project by Martin von Zweigbergk in 2019. It is intended to be a simpler, more performant Git replacement. Jujutsu boasts a radically simplified user interface and integrates ideas from patch-based version control systems for a novel take on resolving merge conflicts. It is written in Rust and available under an Apache 2.0 license.

Internet pioneer and Network Time Protocol (NTP) inventor Dave Mills has died, as reported by Vint Cerf: His daughter, Leigh, just sent me the news that Dave passed away peacefully on January 17, 2024. He was such an iconic element of the early Internet. Network Time Protocol, the Fuzzball routers of the early NSFNET, INARG taskforce lead, COMSAT Labs and University of Delaware and so much more.

More information about Mills can be found on his Wikipedia page.

The proposed mseal() system call stirred up some controversy when it was first posted in October 2023. Since then, it has been evolving in a quieter fashion, and seems to have reached a point where the relevant commenters are willing to accept it. Should mseal() be merged in a future development cycle, it will look rather different than it did at the outset.

The openSUSE News site has put up a brief article on how Slowroll fits into the spectrum of openSUSE distributions.

The idea behind Slowroll is to offer a distribution that improves stability without losing access to new features in the base packages such as the kernel, desktop environments and packaging. These slower update cycles allow for more extensive testing and validation of packages before their inclusion. Think of Slowroll as more of a skip than a Leap.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (chromium, golang-github-facebook-time, podman, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Oracle (.NET 6.0, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, and python3.11-cryptography), Red Hat (java-11-openjdk, python-requests, and python-urllib3), SUSE (chromium, kernel, libcryptopp, libuev, perl-Spreadsheet-ParseExcel, suse-module-tools, and xwayland), and Ubuntu (filezilla and xerces-c).

Luis Villa writes about the recent ruling in the Software Freedom Conservancy's GPL-violation lawsuit against Vizio, wherein the judge refused to agree that the SFC lacks standing to sue.

In some sense, not much has changed: if you were obligated to comply with the GPL two weeks ago, you have the same obligations today. If you didn’t have obligations then, you don’t have them now.

What has changed is who can enforce those obligations. Two weeks ago, we mostly believed that enforcement could only come from the authors of the code. Those folks rarely had time, money, or interest for litigation, and they might also face a lot of pressure from their peers and employers to avoid litigation.

If this ruling holds up at the end of the case, the number of potential enforcers just went way up.

Ken Jin from the Faster CPython project has been working on taking Python's recently-added just-in-time (JIT) compiler further by adding support for a peephole optimizer that rewrites the JIT's intermediate representation to introduce constant folding, type specialization, and other optimizations. Those techniques should provide significant benefits for the performance of many different types of code running on CPython.

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (ImageMagick), Debian (chromium), Fedora (golang-x-crypto, golang-x-mod, golang-x-net, golang-x-text, gtkwave, redis, and zbar), Mageia (tinyxml), Oracle (.NET 7.0, .NET 8.0, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, python3, and sqlite), Red Hat (gstreamer-plugins-bad-free, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, and java-21-openjdk), SUSE (kernel, libqt5-qtbase, libssh, pam, rear23a, and rear27a), and Ubuntu (pam and zookeeper).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 18, 2024 is available.

Python's static-typing feature has come a long way since it was introduced in 2014. Adding type information to functions has always been—and will remain—optional, but typing still remains somewhat contentious. There are multiple kinds of consumers of the information, each with their own needs and wishes, as well as users of the feature with expectations of their own. That has led to the formation of a Python typing council to govern the type system for the language, though, as might be guessed, there are still grumblings from various quarters.

When, at the beginning of November, we posted an open position at LWN, we were only so hopeful; experience has shown that finding writers who are both capable of and interested in writing our sort of material is a challenging task. This time, though, hope was justified: we got a surprising number of applications from highly qualified applicants. The hardest part of the task has, instead, been narrowing down the choice to a hiring decision.

We are pleased to announce that Daroc Alden has just joined LWN's staff. Daroc is a programmer from New England, where they live with their spouse and their cat. They graduated with a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of New Hampshire. In their spare time, they enjoy fiction writing and musicals. They are especially interested in programming language theory and implementation.

Daroc will be taking on some of the load of keeping LWN interesting while helping us to expand our content mix in the areas that our readers are interested in. Please give them your support as they come up to speed within our operation. We are looking forward to having Daroc as part of a reinforced and more energetic LWN going forward.

Networking maintainer Jakub Kicinski (along with several collaborators) has put up a summary of what happened in the kernel's network stack during 2023.

Throughout those releases netdev patch handlers (DaveM, Jakub, Paolo) applied 7243 patches, and the resulting pull requests to Linus described the changes in 6398 words. Given the volume of work we cannot go over every improvement, or even cover networking sub-trees in much detail (BPF enhancements… wireless work on WiFi 7…). We instead try to focus on major themes, and developments we subjectively find interesting.