Version 2.48.0 of the Git source-code management system has been released. There is a long list of incremental improvements and bug fixes; see the announcement and the highlights blog from GitHub for details.
Paolo used to describe himself as a simple practitioner of software development, one of whose missions was to contribute a free real-time system his students could use, study and improve for their research work at the university, welcoming others to join. Many Linux users and businesses owe him a lot, because under his leadership, the RTAI project has always defended the freedom of developers to implement real-time systems, particularly at times when it was threatened. His fierce will for RTAI served the Xenomai project, as well as others.
He will be missed. (LWN interviewed Mantegazza in 2001).
The death of Bram Moolenaar, Vim founder and benevolent dictator for life (BDFL), in 2023 sent a shock through the community, and raised concern about the future of the project. At VimConf 2024 in November, current Vim maintainer Christian Brabandt delivered a keynote on "the new Vim project" that detailed how the community has reorganized itself to continue maintaining Vim and what the future looks like.
Automattic has announced that it is reallocating its resources away from contributing to the WordPress project as a response to the WP Engine lawsuit:
As part of this reset, Automattic will match its volunteering pledge with those made by WP Engine and other players in the ecosystem, or about 45 hours a week that qualify under the Five For the Future program as benefitting the entire community and not just a single company. These hours will likely go towards security and critical updates.LWN last covered the ongoing WordPress saga in December. [Thanks to Paul Wise for the heads-up on this latest development.]
After yesterday's stable kernel releases, Chris Clayton reported a build problem with 6.6.70, which prompted Greg Kroah-Hartman to release 6.6.71 to fix it.
Most of the time, programmers do not need to worry much about provenance, and it is very clear how a pointer got derived. However, when casting pointers to integers and back, the provenance of the resulting pointer is underspecified. With this release, Rust is adding a set of APIs that can in many cases replace the use of integer-pointer-casts, and therefore avoid the ambiguities inherent to such casts. In particular, the pattern of using the lowest bits of an aligned pointer to store extra information can now be implemented without ever casting a pointer to an integer or back. This makes the code easier to reason about, easier to analyze for the compiler, and also benefits tools like Miri and architectures like CHERI that aim to detect and diagnose pointer misuse.
Historically, lawsuits have focused on the copyrights licensed under GPL (or the GPL and LGPL together). Steck's lawsuit uniquely focused exclusively on users' rights under the LGPL. Steck's work showed that despite being a "Lesser" license than GPL, LGPLv2.1 still guarantees users the right to repair, modify and reinstall modified versions of the software on their device. There is now no doubt that both GPL and LGPL mandate the device owner's ability to make changes to the software in the flash memory so those changes persist across reboots.