Version 5.0.0 of the darktable photography workflow application has been released. Major changes in this release include user-interface/user-experience (UI/UX) improvements, speed improvements for bulk operations, and the addition of a inter-script-communication event to allow a running script to send messages to another running script. LWN last looked at darktable in 2022.

While the experiment itself is deemed a failure, I think we learned from it and improved curl in the process. We had to rethink and reassess several implementation details when we aligned HTTP behavior with hyper. libcurl parses and handles HTTP stricter now. Better.

Version 2024.12 of the Debian-based Grml live Linux system for system administrators has been released. Grml 2024.12 uses packages from the upcoming Debian 13 ("trixie") release. It drops support for 32-bit x86 PCs and gains support for 64-bit ARM CPUs. See the release notes for a full list of changes and new features.

The Fedora Engineering Steering Council (FESCo) has made a series of missteps in deciding to revoke a longtime Fedora contributor's provenpackager status. FESCo made the decision during a closed session, based on private complaints. It then publicly announced its decision, including the contributor's name, while only supplying a vague account of the contributor's actions. This has left the Fedora community with more questions than answers, and raised a number of complaints about the transparency of FESCo's process. In addition, the sequence of events has sparked discussions about package ownership, as well as when and how it's appropriate to push changes to packages that a developer doesn't own.

fish is a shell with a custom language and several affordances not available out of the box in other shells, such as directory-sensitive command completion. Although the project does not normally make beta releases, the newly announced 4.0b1 release will have one in order to ensure that no problems were introduced after a major effort to switch the code base from C++ to Rust.

fish is a smart and user-friendly command line shell with clever features that just work, without needing an advanced degree in bash scriptology. Today we are announcing an open beta, inviting all users to try out the upcoming 4.0 release.

fish 4.0 is a big upgrade. It's got lots of new features to make using the command line easier and more enjoyable, such as more natural key binding and expanded history search. And under the hood, we've rebuilt the foundation in Rust to embrace modern computing.

Emacs has had a few bugs related to accidentally permitting the execution of untrusted code. Unfortunately, it seems as though another bug of that sort has appeared — and may be harder to patch, because the problem comes from the way Emacs handles expansion of Lisp macros in code being analyzed. The vulnerability is only practically exploitable in a non-default configuration, so not every Emacs user has something to worry about. The Emacs developers are reportedly working on a fix, but have not yet shared details about it. In the meantime, every Emacs version since at least 26.1 (released in May 2018) through the current development version is vulnerable.

Fedora Magazine reports that the Fedora Asahi Remix 41 for Apple Silicon is now available:

In addition to all the exciting improvements brought by Fedora Linux 41, Fedora Asahi Remix 41 provides x86/x86-64 emulation integration including support for AAA games to Apple Silicon. The game support is based on the new conformant Vulkan 1.4 driver. It also continues to provide extensive device support, including high quality audio out of the box.

LWN covered a talk from the X.org Developers Conference (XDC) by Alyssa Rosenzweig on the status of Asahi's GPU drivers in October.

Since we last looked at the WordPress dispute, WP Engine has sought a preliminary injunction against Automattic and its founder Matt Mullenweg to restore its access to WordPress.org, and more. The judge in the case granted a preliminary injunction on December 10. The case is, of course, of interest to users and developers working with WordPress—but it may also have implications for other open-source projects well beyond the WordPress community.

The Sequoia PGP project has announced version 1.0 of the sq command-line tool for managing OpenPGP encryption and signatures. It also provides a decentralized public key infrastructure (PKI), and key management facilities. This is the first stable release since development began on the project in 2017.

sq's PKI is probably its most notable feature, and the one we invested the most time in. The PKI is used to authenticate certificates, and messages. Authentication is necessary to ensure that you are encrypting to the person you think you are, and to identify who really authored a message; without authentication, encryption and verification are much weaker.