Many distributions provide support out of the proverbial box for Flatpak packages, but Fedora is unusual in that it also provides, and defaults, to its own repository of Fedora-built Flatpaks. This has been a source of confusion for Fedora users, who expect to get the Flatpak built by the original developers and hosted on Flathub. It has also been a source of conflict with upstream projects, because users complain of bugs in Flatpak packages they are not responsible for. The situation has also frustrated some Fedora developers, who would prefer to offer put Flathub's offerings first. A new complaint that Fedora has apparently used manifests from Flathub to build the packages for Fedora—without giving credit to the original authors—has spurred discussions about Fedora's Flatpaks once again. While no concrete changes are on the table, yet, there may be some movement toward addressing persistent complaints.

• Front: FUSE performance; Magic kfuncs; Tails Linux; Direct I/O and modifying buffers; Working with bootable containers.
• Briefs: Kernel LLM policy; Firefox 145; FHS; Homebrew 5.0.0; Mastodon 4.5; Public-inbox 2.0.0; Pytest 9.0.0; Quote; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Version 5.0.0 of the Homebrew package manager for Linux and macOS has been released. Notable changes in this release include download concurrency by default, official support for 64-bit Arm on Linux, and more.

Firefox 145 has been released. Notable changes in this release include note-taking features for PDFs viewed in Firefox, enhanced privacy protections, and the ability to access and manage passwords in the sidebar. This release also drops support for 32-bit Linux systems.

Tails is an unusual Linux distribution developed by the Tor Project; it is designed to help users work around internet censorship and avoid surveillance. It is a "portable" operating system that is meant to be run from a USB stick or ISO image and to leave no trace on the computer it was run on. Tails routes connections to the internet over the Tor network and includes a selection of applications and tools suited to working with sensitive documents, communicating securely, and preserving users' anonymity. The tradeoff, of course, is that Tails is less convenient and requires users to learn a new set of tools to avoid compromising their own security and anonymity. Tails 7.1 was released in October, and it seemed like as good a time as any to take it for a spin.

When programs written in BPF (the kernel's hot-loadable virtual-machine bytecode) call kernel functions (kfuncs), it may be useful for those functions to have additional information about the context in which those BPF programs are executing. Rather than requiring it to supply that information, it would be convenient to let the BPF verifier pass that information to the called function automatically. That is already possible, but a recent patch set from Ihor Solodrai would make it more ergonomic. It allows kernel developers to specify that a kfunc should be passed additional parameters inferred by the verifier, invisibly to the BPF program. The discussion included concerns that Solodrai's implementation was unnecessarily complex, however.

The KeePassXC project has recently updated its contribution policy and README to note its policy around contributions created with generative AI tools. The project's use of those tools, such as GitHub Copilot, have raised a number of questions and concerns, which the project has responded to:

There are no AI features inside KeePassXC and there never will be!

The use of Copilot for drafting pull requests is reserved for very simple and focused tasks with a small handful of changes, such as simple bugfixes or UI changes. We use it sparingly (mostly because it's not very good at complex tasks) and only where we think it offers a benefit. Copilot is good at helping developers plan complex changes by reviewing the code base and writing suggestions in markdown, as well as boilerplate tasks such as test development. Copilot can mess up, and we catch that in our standard review process (e.g., by committing a full directory of rubbish, which we identified and fixed). You can review our copilot instructions. Would we ever let AI rewrite our crypto stack? No. Would we let it refactor and rewrite large parts of the application? No. Would we ask it to fix a regression or add more test cases? Yes, sometimes.

Emphasis in the original. See the full post to learn more about the project's processes and pull requests that have been created with AI assistance.

The bootc project allows users to create a bootable Linux system image using the container tooling that many developers are already familiar with. It is an evolution of OSTree (now called libostree), which is used to create Fedora Silverblue and other image-based distributions. While creating custom images is still a job for experts, the container technology simplifies delivering heavily customized images to non-technical users.

Version 4.5 of the Mastodon decentralized social-media platform has been released. Notable features in this release include quote posts, native emoji support, as well as enhanced moderation and blocking features for server administrators. The project also has a post detailing new features in 4.5 for developers of clients and other software that interacts with Mastodon.

For those who are unaware, the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) is the definition for POSIX operating systems to organize system and user data. It is broadly adopted by Linux, BSD, and other operating systems that follow POSIX-like conventions.

See this page for the specification's new home.