Hírolvasó

The process of adopting a new governance model for the Perl project appears to be reaching an end; the new model is designed to look a lot like the one adopted by the Python project. "So, now Perl has two well-defined bodies involved in its governance: a core team of a few dozen and a steering council of three people. The core team sets the rules of Perl governance, votes on membership of the two groups, and delegates substantial decision making power to the steering council. The steering council has broad authority to make decisions about the development of the Perl language, the interpreter, and all other components, systems and processes that result in new releases of the language interpreter." The full description is available for those looking for the details.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (spip and webkit2gtk), Fedora (kernel and libexif), openSUSE (chromium and rclone), Slackware (mutt), SUSE (kernel, mariadb, and slurm), and Ubuntu (igraph).

The venerable email client Mutt has just reached version 2.0. Mutt is different from the type of client that has come to dominate the email landscape—for one thing, it has no graphical interface. It has a long history that is worth a bit of a look, as are its feature set and extensive customizability. Version 2.0 brings several enhancements to Mutt's interface, configurability, and convenience, as well. In this article, readers who are unfamiliar with Mutt will learn about a different way to deal with the daily chore of wrangling their inboxes, while Mutt experts may discover some new sides to an old friend.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released stable kernels 5.9.11, 5.4.80, 4.19.160, 4.14.209, 4.9.246, and 4.4.246 have been released. They all contain important fixes and users should upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (chromium, microcode_ctl, and seamonkey), Mageia (f2fs-tools, italc, python-cryptography, python-pillow, tcpreplay, and vino), Oracle (thunderbird), Red Hat (bind, kernel, microcode_ctl, net-snmp, and Red Hat Virtualization), Scientific Linux (net-snmp and thunderbird), SUSE (kernel and mariadb), and Ubuntu (atftp, libextractor, pdfresurrect, and pulseaudio).

GNU Guix, a functional package manager and associated free software distribution, was introduced eight years ago. The 1.2.0 release celebrates the anniversary. "A major highlight in this release is the ability to authenticate channels, which probably makes Guix one of the safest ways to deliver complete operating systems today. This was the missing link in our “software supply chain” and we’re glad it’s now fixed. The end result is that guix pull and related commands now cryptographically authenticate channel code that they fetch; you cannot, for instance, retrieve unauthorized commits to the official Guix repository."

For those who are interested in security at the hardware level, this blog post from Andrew 'bunnie' Huang is well worth a read. "Despite any claims you may have heard otherwise, tamper resistance is a largely unsolved problem. Any secrets committed to a non-volatile format are vulnerable to recovery by a sufficiently advanced adversary. The availability of near-atomic level microscopy, along with sophisticated photon and phonon based probing techniques, means that a lab equipped with a few million dollars worth of top-notch gear and well-trained technicians has a good chance of recovering secret key material out of virtually any non-volatile storage media. The hard part is figuring out where the secrets are located on the chip."

Security updates have been issued by Debian (cimg, golang-1.7, golang-1.8, krb5, mediawiki, mupdf, php-pear, samba, thunderbird, and zabbix), Fedora (chromium, krb5, microcode_ctl, pngcheck, and rpki-client), Mageia (librepo, postgresql, python-twisted, raptor2, tcpdump, and thunderbird), openSUSE (blueman, java-11-openjdk, moinmoin-wiki, python, rmt-server, SDL, and tcpdump), Red Hat (chromium-browser and thunderbird), SUSE (c-ares, ceph, dash, firefox, java-1_8_0-openjdk, postgresql10, postgresql12, postgresql96, u-boot, and ucode-intel), and Ubuntu (openldap).

The 5.10-rc5 kernel prepatch is out. "The 5.10 release candidates stubbornly keeps staying fairly big, even though by rc5 we really should be seeing things starting to calm down and shrink. There's nothing in here that makes me particularly nervous, but in pure numbers of commits, this is the largest rc5 we've had in the 5.x series."

The 5.9.10, 5.4.79, 4.19.159, 4.14.208, 4.9.245, and 4.4.245 stable kernel updates are all available. Each contains another set of important fixes, as usual.

The various system calls and other APIs that the kernel provides for access to files and filesystems has grown increasingly comprehensive over the years. That does not mean, though, that there is no need or room for improvement. Several relatively small additions to the kernel's filesystem-related API are under consideration in the development community; read on for a survey of some of this work.

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (firefox), Fedora (chromium, microcode_ctl, mingw-libxml2, seamonkey, and xen), openSUSE (slurm_18_08 and tor), Oracle (thunderbird), SUSE (buildah, firefox, go1.14, go1.15, krb5, microcode_ctl, perl-DBI, podman, postgresql12, thunderbird, ucode-intel, wireshark, wpa_supplicant, and xen), and Ubuntu (firefox and phpmyadmin).

Over on the Collabora blog, Pekka Paalanen writes about adding color management and high dynamic range (HDR) support to the Wayland display server protocol. X11 already has support for color management tools and workflow, but not HDR, and Wayland currently doesn't support either, but Paalanen and others are working to change that. "As color management is all about color spaces and gamuts, and high dynamic range (HDR) is also very much about color spaces and gamuts plus extended luminance range, Sebastian [Wick] and I decided that Wayland color management extension should cater for both from the beginning. Combining traditional color management and HDR is a fairly new thing as far as I know, and I'm not sure we have much prior art to base upon, so this is an interesting research journey as well. There is a lot of prior art on HDR and color management separately, but they tend to have fundamental differences that makes the combination not obvious."

The GCompris project, which provides a "high quality educational software suite, including a large number of activities for children aged 2 to 10", has announced its 1.0 release, which celebrates the 20th anniversary of the project. It includes more than 100 activities, a new Dataset selection in the Activity Settings menu for more than 50 activities, and four new activities, including an Analog Electricity activity to simulate and learn about circuits. KDE.news covered the release: "We have built the activities to follow the principles of 'nothing succeeds like success' and that children, when learning, should be challenged, but not made to feel threatened. Thus, GCompris congratulates, but does not reprimand; all the characters the child interacts with are friendly and supportive; activities are brightly colored, contain encouraging voices and play upbeat, but soothing music. The hardware requirements for running GCompris are extremely low and it will run fine on older computers or low-powered machines, like the Raspberry Pi. This saves you and your school from having to invest in new and expensive equipment and it is also eco-friendly, as it reduces the amount of technological waste that is produced when you have to renew computers to adapt to more and more power-hungry software. GCompris works on Windows, Android and GNU/Linux computers, and on desktop machines, laptops, tablets and phones."

Almost every filesystem (excepting relics like VFAT) implements the concept of the owner and group of each file; the higher levels of the operating system then use that information to control access to those files. For decades, it has usually sufficed to track a single owner and group for each file, but there is an increasing number of use cases wanting to make that ownership relative to the environment any given process is running in. Developers have been working for a few years to find solutions to this problem; the latest attempt is the ID-mapped mounts patch set from Christian Brauner.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 5.9.9, 5.4.78, 4.19.158, 4.14.207, 4.9.244, and 4.4.244 stable kernels. They all contain important fixes throughout the kernel tree; users of those series should upgrade.

Version 1.48.0 of the Rust language has been released. The biggest change appears to be improvements to the documentation system, but there's more: "The most significant API change is kind of a mouthful: [T; N]: TryFrom<Vec<T>> is now stable. What does this mean? Well, you can use this to try and turn a vector into an array of a given length".

Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (chromium and firefox), CentOS (bind, curl, fence-agents, kernel, librepo, libvirt, microcode_ctl, python, python3, qt and qt5-qtbase, resource-agents, and tomcat), Debian (drupal7, firefox-esr, jupyter-notebook, packer, python3.5, and rclone), Fedora (firefox), Mageia (firefox, nss), openSUSE (gdm, kernel-firmware, and moinmoin-wiki), Oracle (net-snmp), SUSE (libzypp, zypper), and Ubuntu (c-ares).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for November 19, 2020 is available.