Hírolvasó

Back In Time is a GPL-2.0-licensed backup tool based on rsync and written in Python. It has both graphical and command-line interfaces, and supports backups to local disks or over SSH. Back In Time was originally written by Oprea Dan and released in 2009. The tool has been through some rough patches over the years, and is currently on its third set of maintainers. Christian Buhtz, one of the current maintainers, explained to me how he and his co-maintainers had revived the project, as well as why he thought Back In Time stood out from all of the existing backup solutions.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has shared another seven stable kernel updates: 6.6.60, 6.11.7, 6.1.116, 5.15.171, 5.10.229, 5.4.285, and 4.19.323.

Fedora Linux, as a rule, handles version upgrades reasonably well. However, there are times when users may want to do a fresh installation rather than an upgrade but preserve existing users and data under /home. This is a scenario that the Fedora installer, currently, does not address. Users can maintain a separate /home partition, of course, but the installer does not incorporate existing users into the new install—that is an exercise left to the user to handle. One solution might be to use systemd-homed, a systemd service for managing users and home directories. However, a discussion proposing the use systemd-homed as part of Fedora installation uncovered some hurdles, such as trying to blend its approach to managing users with tools that centralize user management.

Likewise, many GCC plugins are used for increasing the safety of critical projects such as the Linux kernel, which has recently gained support for the Rust programming language. This makes gccrs a useful tool for analyzing unsafe Rust code, and more generally Rust code which has to interact with existing C code. We also want gccrs to be a useful tool for rustc itself by helping pan out the Rust specification effort with a unique viewpoint - that of a tool trying to replicate another's functionality, oftentimes through careful experimentation and source reading where the existing documentation did not go into enough detail.

(LWN last looked at gccrs in October).