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In September, a group of long-time maintainers of Ruby packaging tools projects had their GitHub privileges for revoked by nonprofit corporation Ruby Central in what many people are calling a hostile takeover. Ruby Central and its board members have issued several public statements that have, so far, failed to satisfy many in the Ruby community. In response, some of the former contributors to RubyGems are working on an alternative service called gem.coop . On October 17, ownership of the RubyGe…

Importing modules in Python is ubiquitous; most Python programs start with at least a few import statements. But the performance impact of those imports can be large—and may be entirely wasted effort if the symbols imported end up being unused. There are multiple ways to lazily import modules, including one in the standard library, but none of them are part of the Python language itself. That may soon change, if the recently proposed PEP 810 ("Explicit lazy imports") is approved.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (imagemagick, incus, lxd, pgagent, svgpp, and sysstat), Fedora (chromium, complyctl, fetchmail, firefox, mbedtls, mingw-binutils, mingw-python3, mingw-qt5-qtsvg, mingw-qt6-qtsvg, python3.10, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, runc, and suricata), Mageia (expat), Red Hat (firefox, kernel, qt5-qtbase, and qt6-qtbase), Slackware (stunnel), SUSE (chromium, coredns, ctdb, firefox, kernel, libexslt0, libpoppler-cpp2, ollama, openssl-1_1, pam, samba, and thu…

The 6.18-rc2 kernel prepatch is out. End result: rc2 is on the bigger side, and we still have some of the remaining regressions outstanding, but we should be making slow progress. It's fairly early days yet, so I'm not very worried. Things on the whole look fairly normal.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.17.4 6.12.54 6.6.113 6.1.157 , and 5.15.195 stable kernels. As usual, each contains important fixes; users of those kernels are advised to upgrade.

The Ruby community has experienced some turbulence of late after Ruby Central took control of the GitHub repositories for a number of projects including RubyGems and Bundler . Those projects have historically been developed separately from Ruby itself. They are now being put under the control of Ruby's core team, according to Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto (a.k.a. "Matz"): To provide the community with long-term stability and continuity, the Ruby core team, led by Matz, has decided to assume s…

Ruby libraries and applications are distributed via a packaging format called a gem . RubyGems.org has been the central hosting service for gems since about 2010. This article is part one of a two-part series on the RubyGems.org takeover by Ruby Central . Understanding the history of RubyGems.org, and the contributor community behind it, is vital to making sense of the current power struggle between Ruby Central and members of the Ruby community who have maintained those services and tools for …

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel and libssh), Debian (firefox-esr and pgpool2), Mageia (varnish & lighttpd), Red Hat (python3, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, and python39:3.9), SUSE (expat, gstreamer-plugins-rs, kernel, openssl1, pgadmin4, python311-ldap, and squid), and Ubuntu (dotnet8, dotnet9, dotnet10 and mupdf).

There have been many discussions in the free-software community about the role of large language models (LLMs) in software development. For the most part, though, those conversations have focused on whether projects should be accepting code output by those models, and under what conditions. But there are other ways in which these systems might participate in the development process. Chris Mason recently started a discussion on the Kernel Summit discussion list about how these models can be used…

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel and libsoup3), Debian (chromium and firefox-esr), Fedora (httpd), Oracle (cups, ImageMagick, kernel, and vim), Red Hat (libssh), Slackware (samba), SUSE (alloy, exim, firefox-esr, ImageMagick, kernel, libcryptopp-devel, libQt6Svg6, libsoup-3_0-0, libtiff-devel-32bit, lsd, python3-gi-docgen, python311-Authlib, qt6-base, samba, and squid), and Ubuntu (ffmpeg, linux-oracle-6.8, redict, redis, samba, and subversion).

Version 13.0 of the Forgejo software forge has been released. Notable changes in this release include content moderation features, ability to require 2FA for users or administrators, and a migration feature for Pagure repositories. The last will be useful for Fedora's move to Forgejo as its new git forge. See the release notes for all changes in 13.0.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front : LLMs and copyright; Systemd packaging in Debian; Gccrs; FineIBT; 6.18 Merge window; Interrupt-aware spinlocks; Fedora's /boot. Briefs : Librephone; LMDE 7; Ubuntu 25.10; Firefox 144.0; Julia 1.12; ... Announcements : Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Boqun Feng spoke at Kangrejos 2025 about adding a frequently needed API for Rust drivers that need to handle interrupts: interrupt-aware spinlocks. Most drivers will need to communicate information from interrupt handlers to main driver code, and this exchange is frequently synchronized with the use of spinlocks. While his first attempts ran into problems, Feng's ultimate solution could help prevent bugs in C code as well, by tracking the number of nested scopes that have disabled interrupts. T…

Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 7, based on Debian 13 ("trixie"), has been released : Its goal is to ensure Linux Mint would be able to continue to deliver the same user experience, and how much work would be involved, if Ubuntu was ever to disappear. LMDE is also one of our development targets, to guarantee the software we develop is compatible outside of Ubuntu. The LMDE release notes are rather sparse; users are also advised to review Debian 13's release notes .

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, vim, and webkit2gtk3), Debian (distro-info-data, https-everywhere, and php-horde-css-parser), Fedora (inih, mingw-exiv2, mirrorlist-server, rust-maxminddb, rust-monitord-exporter, rust-prometheus, rust-prometheus_exporter, rust-protobuf, rust-protobuf-codegen, rust-protobuf-parse, and rust-protobuf-support), Mageia (fetchmail), Oracle (gnutls, kernel, vim, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, and webkit2gtk3), Slackware…