The Fedora Council is considering a conflict-of-interest (COI) policy for its decision-making bodies, such as the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), special-interest groups (SIGs), and any other groups or individuals that report to the council and are responsible for decisions that impact the Fedora project. The current draft does not, however, apply to the council itself. The public discussion for the COI policy began on July 23 and seems to be nearing completion, with the council set to discuss the topic again during its meeting on August 13.

John MacFarlane has published a lengthy retrospective to commemorate twenty years of the Pandoc document converter.

On August 3, 2006, I uploaded the first version of pandoc to my website, releasing it under the free GPL license. Pandoc 0.1 consisted of about 3000 lines of Haskell code, with no dependencies aside from GHC's standard library. It could convert Markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX documents into any of these formats, plus RTF or S5. I had no idea at the time that this would just be the first of over two hundred releases over the next twenty years; that the project would become the most popular program written in Haskell; that I would spend countless hours on bug-fixes, improvement, and project management; that I would collaborate with programmers in many other countries; that pandoc would come to support over fifty document formats; that it would allow automatic generation of citations and bibliographies; that it would become integrated into academic writing tools like Quarto and Jupyter Notebook; that it would be installed on millions of computers around the world.

How did this happen? I want to take advantage of pandoc's birthday to tell the story of the project, as best I can remember it.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.6, 6.18.42, 6.12.101, and 6.6.148 stable kernels. Each contains hundreds of patches—the 7.1.6 kernel has more than 700—with fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to upgrade.

The release of NetBSD 11.0, the 19th major version of the operating system, has been announced. There are many changes and enhancements since the 10.1 release, including a new port to RISC-V, better support for Linux system calls in compat_linux(), as well as improvements to the NPF firewall.

As you are probably aware, the number of security issues found or suspected everywhere has massively increased with the advent of AI tools. As a consequence, we can't publish a release without open issues. Instead of delaying the release further to fix them (new ones are being reported all the time), we've instead chosen to be transparent about this.

See the full release notes for links to the binary distributions and links to the full change logs.

The Servo web-browser engine project has published an update about all of the changes that landed in June 2026, along with version 0.4.0 of the Servo Tech Demo. This release includes a record 558 commits, better layout correctness for web sites, improved WebGPU support, enhancements for users who are using the servoshell test browser, and many performance and stability fixes.

The Arch Linux DevOps team has announced that adoption of orphaned packages in the Arch User Repository (AUR) has been disabled due to "the current influx of malicious package adoptions and follow-up commits made via the AUR". Michael Taggart has posted a brief analysis of the malware being added to a long list of packages in this round of attacks. The payload appears to be an remote-access trojan (RAT) that takes commands over the Tor network and attempts to upload a wide range of user data.

The project had suspended new account registration in June. That followed a campaign in which an attacker or attackers created new accounts to adopt orphaned packages and push malicious updates to them that would install malware on user systems. AUR registration was reopened on July 13 after the DevOps team added some minor, and apparently ineffective, restrictions on creating new accounts.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.18.41, 6.12.100, 6.6.147, 6.1.180, 5.15.213, and 5.10.262 stable kernels.

Each of these kernels contains a single fix for a use-after-free vulnerability (CVE-2026-64560). Users of these kernels are advised to upgrade.

• Front: Hazard pointers; DFSG team; Swap devices; Netkit and BPF; BPF inlined functions; Fedora GRUB; gccrs.
• Briefs: RIP Dan Williams; Debian LLM resolution; Fedora 45 process; Codeberg LLM policy; GCC LLM policy; GNU Binutils 2.47; GNU C Library 2.44; Wayfire 0.11; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.12.99, 6.6.146, and 6.1.179 stable kernels. This batch of stable kernels includes a single fix for a regression caused by this commit. Users of those kernels should upgrade.

Leo Sandoval and Marta Lewandowska have put forward a change proposal for Fedora 45, which is expected in October, to provide a separate, slimmed-down version of GRUB for a niche use case. The new package would be in addition to the main GRUB package and would not replace it for the majority of Fedora users. The idea met with some resistance from Fedora contributors who thought that it would be better to use systemd-boot, or another modern bootloader, rather than trying to wrangle GRUB into a suitable state for the use case. The Fedora Engineering Steering Council (FESCo), however, voted to accept the change on July 7.

The GCC steering committee has announced that it has accepted an AI contributions policy recommended by the GCC AI policy working group.

The policy, in part, states that the project will decline any "legally significant contributions which include LLM-generated content or are derived from LLM-generated content". It uses the definition of "legally significant" from the GNU Project maintainer guidelines, which holds that the threshold is "around 15 lines of code and/or text" to qualify as significant for copyright purposes. GCC maintainers may, however, choose to accept legally significant test cases that are generated by an LLM.

The policy does not forbid use of LLMs for research, analysis, bug discovery and reporting, patch review, etc. as long as the output is not included in contributions. The committee says that it expects the policy will evolve and will be revisited periodically.

Version 0.11 of the wlroots-based Wayfire Wayland compositor has been released. Notable changes include better fractional scaling, per-output ICC profiles, support for additional Wayland protocols, and more.

The DFSG, Licensing & New Packages Team (usually shortened to "DFSG team") was created in October 2025 as part of the ftpmaster team split. Its job is to review packages in the new queue for compliance with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), among other things, before the packages are allowed to enter the Debian archive. The change was long in coming, and some questions remained after the split whether it was the right move. Andrew McMillan provided an overview of the team's activities and its current status during DebConf26. While it may be too early to say with certainty, his report suggests that the new division of duties is working out well.