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2023 PSF annual impact report
The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has announced its annual impact report for 2023. The report includes updates from PSF staff as well as summaries of the foundation's activities, financials, and infrastructure. The PSF celebrated the 20th anniversary of PyCon US, distributed more than $370,000 in grants, and enjoyed impressive traffic on PyPI:
In 2023 PyPI saw a 45% growth in download counts and bandwidth alike, serving 603,378,275 downloads for the 516,402 projects hosted there requiring 747.4 Petabytes of data transfer, or 189.6 Gbps of bandwidth 24x7x365.
See the full report for a breakdown of grant disbursements and trends, PSF expenses, and high-level plans for the rest of 2024.
[$] Modernizing accessibility for desktop Linux
In some aspects, such as in gaming, the Linux desktop has made enormous strides in the past few years. In others, such as accessibility, things have stagnated. At Open Source Summit North America (OSSNA), Matt Campbell spoke about the need for, and an approach to, modernizing accessibility for desktop Linux. This included a discussion of Newton, a fledgling project that may greatly improve accessibility on the Linux desktop.
GNU nano 8.0 released
Version 8.0 of the terminal text editor GNU nano has been released. This update includes several changes to keybindings to be more newcomer-friendly, such as remapping Ctrl-F to forward-search and adding an option for modern bindings:
Command-line option --modernbindings (-/) makes ^Q quit, ^X cut, ^C copy, ^V paste, ^Z undo, ^Y redo, ^O open a file, ^W write a file, ^R replace, ^G find again, ^D find again backwards, ^A set the mark, ^T jump to a line, ^P show the position, and ^E execute.
The release also provides access to 14 levels of gray scale in xterm (up from four), as well as many bug fixes.
[$] A look at Ubuntu Desktop LTS 24.04
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, code-named "Noble Numbat", was released on April 25. This release includes GNOME 46, installer updates, security enhancements, a lot of updated packages, and a new App Center that puts a heavy emphasis on using Snaps to install software. It is not an ambitious release, but it brings enough to the table that it's a worthwhile update.
Security updates for Wednesday
[$] Security patterns and anti-patterns in embedded development
When it comes to security, telling developers to do (or not do) something can be ineffective. Helping them understand the why behind instructions, by illustrating good and bad practices using stories, can be much more effective. With several such stories Marta Rybczyńska fashioned an interesting talk about patterns and anti-patterns in embedded Linux security at the Embedded Open Source Summit (EOSS), co-located with Open Source Summit North America (OSSNA), on April 16 in Seattle, Washington.
Security updates for Wednesday
[$] Linus and Dirk chat about AI, XZ, hardware, and more
One of the mainstays of the the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit is the "fireside chat" (sans fire) between Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel to discuss open source and Linux kernel topics of the day. On April 17, at Open Source Summit North America (OSSNA) in Seattle, Washington, they held with tradition and discussed a range of topics including proper whitespace parsing, security, and the current AI craze.
[$] Gentoo bans AI-created contributions
Gentoo Council member Michał Górny posted
an RFC to the gentoo-dev mailing
list in late February about banning "'AI'-backed (LLM/GPT/whatever)
contributions
" to the Gentoo Linux project. Górny wrote that the spread of the
"AI bubble
" indicated a need for Gentoo to formally take a stand on AI
tools. After a lengthy discussion, the Gentoo Council voted
unanimously this week to adopt his proposal and ban contributions generated with AI/ML tools.
[$] Fedora 40 firms up for release
Fedora 40 Beta was released on March 26, and the final release is nearing completion. So far, the release is coming together nicely with major updates for GNOME, KDE Plasma, and the usual cavalcade of smaller updates and enhancements. As part of the release, the project also scuttled Delta RPMs and OpenSSL 1.1.
Gentoo Linux becomes an SPI Associated Project
The Gentoo Linux project has announced
that it is now an Associated Project of Software in the Public Interest
(SPI), which will allow it to accept tax deductible donations in the
US and reduce its "non-technical workload
":
The current Gentoo Foundation has bylaws restricting its behavior to that of a non-profit, is a recognized non-profit only in New Mexico, but a for-profit entity at the US federal level. A direct conversion to a federally recognized non-profit would be unlikely to succeed without significant effort and cost.
[...] SPI is already now recognized at US federal level as a full-[fledged] non-profit 501(c)(3). It also handles several projects of similar type and size (e.g., Arch and Debian) and as such has exactly the experience and background that Gentoo needs.
According to the announcement, the goal is to "eventually
transfer the existing assets to SPI and dissolve the Gentoo
Foundation
". How to do that is still under discussion. This will
not affect Förderverein
Gentoo e.V., which has public-benefit status in Germany and can
accept tax deductible donations in Europe.
Four stable kernel updates
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced another round of stable kernel updates: 6.8.5, 6.6.26, 6.1.85, and 5.15.154 have all been released; each contains another set of important fixes, including the mitigations for the recently disclosed branch history injection hardware vulnerability.
Security updates for Wednesday
Rivendell v4.2.0 released
Version 4.2.0 of the Rivendell radio automation system has been released. Changes include a new data feed for 'next' data objects, improvements to its podcast system, numerous bug fixes, and more.
GNU Stow 2.4.0 released
Version 2.4.0 of the GNU Stow symbolic-link manager has been released. This marks the first release for GNU Stow since 2019. Maintainer Adam Spires wrote:
I would like to sincerely apologise to all Stow users for this incredibly overdue release, the cadence of which is perhaps vaguely reminiscent of releases by the great Donald Knuth, except with none of the grace and deliberate planning.
Spires notes that this release "makes considerable efforts to make the
internals more understandable and easy to maintain
", and has put out a
call for a co-maintainer.
Security updates for Monday
Tridge returns to rsync
Wayne Davison has announced the release of rsync version 3.3.0, which contains a number of bug fixes and minor enhancements. Davison has also announced a change in maintainers and a move to a new GitHub project:
The github repos have moved to a new RsyncProject organization. Because various life events have been monopolizing my time, I reached out to Tridge [Andrew Tridgell] (the original author) and he has graciously agreed to get back into rsync work, along with Paul Mackerras, who was also an early contributor to rsync. This new team will be working mainly on maintenance tasks, and not so much on new features. If you want to get involved, feel free to reach out on the new discord RsyncProject channels.
The new GitHub organization is here.
[$] A look at the 2024 Debian Project Leader election
The nominations have closed and campaigning is underway to see who will be the next Debian Project Leader (DPL). This year, two candidates are campaigning for the position Jonathan Carter has held for four eventful years: Sruthi Chandran and Andreas Tille. Topics that have emerged so far include how the prospective DPLs would spend project money, their opinions on handling controversial topics, and project diversity.