Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1042131/

Ruby libraries and
applications are distributed via a packaging format called a gem. RubyGems.org has been the central
hosting service for gems since about 2010. This article is part one of
a two-part series on the RubyGems.org takeover by Ruby Central. Understanding the
history of RubyGems.org, and the contributor community behind it, is
vital to making sense of the current power
struggle between Ruby Central and members of the Ruby
community who have maintained those services and tools for many
years.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1042229/

Version
13.0 of the Forgejo software forge has been released. Notable
changes in this release include content
moderation features, ability to require
2FA for users or administrators, and a migration
feature for Pagure repositories. The last will be useful for
Fedora’s move
to Forgejo as its new git forge. See the release
notes for all changes in 13.0.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1042079/

Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 7, based on Debian 13
(“trixie”), has been released:

Its goal is to ensure Linux Mint would be able to continue to deliver
the same user experience, and how much work would be involved, if
Ubuntu was ever to disappear. LMDE is also one of our development
targets, to guarantee the software we develop is compatible outside of
Ubuntu.

The LMDE release notes
are rather sparse; users are also advised to review Debian 13’s
release
notes.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1042076/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, vim, and webkit2gtk3), Debian (distro-info-data, https-everywhere, and php-horde-css-parser), Fedora (inih, mingw-exiv2, mirrorlist-server, rust-maxminddb, rust-monitord-exporter, rust-prometheus, rust-prometheus_exporter, rust-protobuf, rust-protobuf-codegen, rust-protobuf-parse, and rust-protobuf-support), Mageia (fetchmail), Oracle (gnutls, kernel, vim, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, and webkit2gtk3), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (curl, libxslt, and net-tools), and Ubuntu (linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-6.8, linux-azure-fips, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.14, and linux-raspi).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1042013/

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.17.3, 6.12.53, 6.6.112, and 6.1.156 stable kernels. As usual, each
contains important fixes throughout the kernel tree. Users of these
kernels are advised to upgrade.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1041916/

Version
1.12 of Julia has been released. Highlights of the release include
new
multi-threading features, new
tracing flags and macros, and an experimental
--trim feature. See the release
notes for a full list of new features, changes, and
improvements. LWN last covered Julia in
January.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1041316/

Debian packagers have a great deal of latitude when it comes to the
configuration of the software they package; they may opt, for example,
to disable default
features in software that they feel are a security
hazard. However, packagers are expected to ensure that their packages
comply with Debian Policy,
regardless of the upstream’s preferences. If a packager fails to
comply with the policy, the Debian Technical
Committee (TC) can step in to override them, which it has
done in the case of a recent systemd change that broke several
programs that depend on a world-writable /run/lock
directory.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1041078/

Sudden increases in the size of Fedora’s initramfs
files have prompted the project to fast-track a proposal to increase
the default size of the /boot partition for new installs of
Fedora 43 and later. The project has also walked back a few
changes that have contributed to larger initramfs files, but the
ever-increasing size of firmware means that the need for more room is
unavoidable. The Fedora Engineering Steering Council (FESCo) has
approved a last-minute change
just before the final freeze for Fedora 43 to increase the
default size of the /boot partition from 1GB to 2GB; this
will leave plenty of space for kernels and initramfs images if a user
is installing from scratch, but it is of no help for users upgrading
from Fedora 42.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1041405/

Ubuntu
25.10, “Questing Quokka”, has been released. This release includes
Linux 6.17, GNOME 49, GCC 15, Python 3.13.7,
Rust 1.85, and more. This release also features Rust-based
implementations of sudo and coreutils; LWN covered the switch to the
Rust-based tools in March. The 25.10 version of Ubuntu flavors
Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Cinnamon, Ubuntu
Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu have also
been released.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1041266/

Firefox has long had support for multiple profiles
to store personal information such as bookmarks, passwords, and user
preferences. However, Firefox did not make profiles particularly
discoverable or easy to manage. That is about to change; Mozilla has
announced
that it is launching a profile-management feature that will make it
easier to create and switch between profiles. According to the support
page for the feature, it will be rolled out to users gradually
beginning on October 14.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1041243/

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (apptainer, civetweb, mod_http2, openssl, pandoc, and pandoc-cli), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, iputils, kernel, open-vm-tools, and podman), SUSE (cairo, firefox, ghostscript, gimp, gstreamer-plugins-rs, libxslt, logback, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-1_1, python-xmltodict, and rubygem-puma), and Ubuntu (gst-plugins-base1.0, linux-aws-6.8, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure, linux-azure-nvidia, linux-gke, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, and linux-raspi).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1039481/

Systemd
v258 was released on September 17 after more than nine months
of development. LWN has already covered some of the
features and changes being readied for v258 before it was final. Now
that the release is out, it is time to look at more of what came in
v258, including a sandbox shell, new boot options, service-level disk
quotas, and enhancements to systemd-resolved.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1031669/

Despite its name, the Robot
Operating System (ROS) is not an operating system; it is
a software development kit (SDK) that provides building blocks for
robotic applications. One of the main goals of ROS is to present a
common API that abstracts away the details of particular hardware
drivers or algorithms to make development easier; developers can focus
on what a robot should do rather than the low-level details of
specific controllers. The latest release of ROS, Kilted
Kaiju, features improvements to the middleware layer that is used
to deliver data between components.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1040410/

The Alpine Linux project has announced
plans to change its base filesystem hierarchy:

In the future, /lib, /bin, and /sbin
will be symbolic links to their /usr counterparts, and every package
shall be installed under the /usr paths. For now,
/usr/bin and /usr/sbin will continue to be independent paths,
but that might change if the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) gets
updated.

The merge will take place in the upcoming Alpine 3.23 release
planned for November; non-merged systems will be considered
unsupported when 3.22 is at its end of life in May 2027.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1039623/

The Fedora
Council began a process to create a policy on AI-assisted
contributions in 2024, starting with a survey to ask the community
its opinions about AI and using AI technologies in Fedora. On
September 25, Jason Brooks published
a draft policy for discussion; so far, in keeping with the spirit of
compromise, it has something to make everyone unhappy. For some it is
too AI-friendly, while others have complained that it holds Fedora
back from experimenting with AI tooling.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1040375/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, mysql:8.0, and openssh), Debian (libcommons-lang-java, libcommons-lang3-java, libcpanel-json-xs-perl, libjson-xs-perl, libxml2, open-vm-tools, and u-boot), Fedora (bird, dnsdist, mapserver, ntpd-rs, python-nh3, and rust-ammonia), Oracle (kernel and mysql:8.0), Red Hat (cups, postgresql:12, and postgresql:13), SUSE (cJSON-devel, gimp, kernel-devel, kubecolor, open-vm-tools, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, and ruby3.4-rubygem-rack), and Ubuntu (linux-azure-5.15 and openssl, openssl1.0).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1040236/

Version 1.5.0
of the Radicle peer-to-peer Git collaboration platform has been
released. This release includes better support for bare repositories,
structured logging, and improvements in the output of rad patch
show:

The previous output would differentiate “updates”, where the original
author creates a new revision, and “revisions”, where another author
creates a revision. This could be confusing since updates are also
revisions. Instead, the output shows a timeline of the root of the
patch and each new revision, without any differentiation. The revision
identifiers, head commit of the revision, and author are still printed
as per usual.

LWN covered Radicle
in March 2024.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1019688/

The openSUSE project is nearing the release of Leap 16, its
first major release since openSUSE Leap 15
in May 2018. This release brings some changes to the
core of the distribution aside from the usual software upgrades; YaST has been retired,
SELinux has replaced AppArmor as the default mandatory access control
(MAC) system, and more. If all goes according to plan, Leap 16
final should be released in early October, with planned support
through 2031.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1039483/

Version
18 of the PostgreSQL database has been released. Notable
improvements in this release include “skip scan” lookups for
multicolumn B-tree indexes, virtual
generated columns, better text processing, oauth
authentication, and a new asynchronous I/O (AIO) subsystem to improve
performance:

AIO lets PostgreSQL issue multiple I/O requests concurrently instead
of waiting for each to finish in sequence. This expands existing
readahead and improves overall throughput. AIO operations supported in
PostgreSQL 18 include sequential scans, bitmap heap scans, and
vacuum. Benchmarking has demonstrated performance gains of up to 3x in
certain scenarios.

There are, of course, many other improvements and changes; see the
release
notes for full details.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1039311/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel and kernel-rt), Fedora (expat), Red Hat (kernel and multiple packages), SUSE (avahi, busybox, busybox-links, kernel, sevctl, tcpreplay, thunderbird, and tor), and Ubuntu (isc-kea, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-aws-6.8, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-aws-fips, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-realtime, python-pip, and rabbitmq-server).