[$] Brian Kernighan on the origins of Unix

Once again, the COVID pandemic has forced linux.conf.au to go virtual, thus
depriving your editor of a couple of 24-hour, economy-class, middle-seat
experiences. This naturally leads to a set of mixed feelings. LCA has
always put a priority on…

FFmpeg 5.0 released

Version 5.0 of the FFmpeg
audio and video toolkit has been released.

For this long-overdue release, a major effort underwent to remove
the old encode/decode APIs and replace them with an N:M-based API,
the entire libavresample library was r…

[$] Struct slab comes to 5.17

The ongoing memory folio work has caused
ripples through much of the kernel and inspired a few side projects, one of
which was the removal of slab-specific
fields from struct page. That work has been pulled into the
mainline for the 5.17 kernel…

Rust 1.58.0 released

Version
1.58.0 of the Rust programming language is available.

Rust 1.58 brings captured identifiers in format strings, a change
to the Command search path on Windows, more
#[must_use] annotations in the standard library, and some
new libra…

Streamlining Inkscape for the masses (Libre Arts)

Libre Arts has posted an
interview with four Inkscape developers.

From what I understand, what helped was finally porting the user
interface from GTK2 to GTK3. It was just a huge task and brought
many regressions, some of them are still in …

[$] The first half of the 5.17 merge window

As of this writing, just short of 7,000 non-merge commits have been pulled
into the mainline kernel repository for the 5.17 release. The changes
pulled thus far bring new features across the kernel; read on for a summary
of what has been merged…

IPython 8.0 released

Version
8.0 of the IPython read-eval-print-loop implementation for Python is
out.

This major release comes with many improvements to the existing
codebase and several new features. These new features are code
reformatting with Black in the …

Malcolm: Prevent Trojan Source attacks with GCC 12

David Malcolm describes
some GCC improvements to defend against bidirectional-text attacks in
source code.

My colleague Marek Polacek and I implemented a new warning for GCC
12, -Wbidi-chars, for detecting Trojan Source attacks involving
Un…

Security updates for Wednesday

Security updates have been issued by Debian (cfrpki, gdal, and lighttpd), Fedora (perl-CPAN and roundcubemail), Mageia (firefox), openSUSE (jawn, kernel, and thunderbird), Oracle (kernel, openssl, and webkitgtk4), Red Hat (cpio, idm:DL1, kernel,…