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GNOME Foundation announces new executive director

LWN

The GNOME Foundation has announced the hiring of Steven Deobald as its new executive director.

Steven has been a GNOME user since 2002 and has been involved in numerous free software initiatives throughout his career. His professional background spans technical leadership, cooperative business development, and nonprofit work. Having worked with projects like XTDB and Endatabas, he brings valuable experience in open source product development. Based in Halifax, Canada, Steven is well-positioned to collaborate with our global community across time zones.

[$] Debian's AWKward essential set

LWN

The Debian project has the concept of essential packages, which provide the bare minimum functionality considered absolutely necessary (or "essential") for a system to function. Packages tagged as essential, and the packages that are required by the set of essential packages, are always installed as part of a Debian system. However, Debian's packaging rules do not require developers to explicitly declare dependencies on that set of packages (the essential set) but they can simply rely on the fact that those will always be present. That means that changing the essential set, as the project may wish to do occasionally, is more complicated than it should be. This came to light recently when a Debian developer asked what might be required to remove mawk to slim down the project's container images.

Deepin Desktop removed from openSUSE

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The SUSE Security Team has announced the removal of the Deepin Desktop from openSUSE due to violations of the project's packaging policy.

The discovery of the bypass of the security whitelistings via the deepin-feature-enable package marks a turning point in our assessment of Deepin. We don't believe that the openSUSE Deepin packager acted with bad intent when he implemented the "license agreement" dialog to bypass our whitelisting restrictions. The dialog itself makes the security concerns we have transparent, so this does not happen in a sneaky way, at least not towards users. It was not discussed with us, however, and it violates openSUSE packaging policies. Beyond the security aspect, this also affects general packaging quality assurance: the D-Bus configuration files and Polkit policies installed by the deepin-feature-enable package are unknown to the package manager and won't be cleaned up upon package removal, for example. Such bypasses are not deemed acceptable by us.

Security updates for Wednesday

LWN
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (incus and nodejs20), Red Hat (freetype, kernel, kernel-rt, libsoup, libtiff, redis, redis:6, and thunderbird), SUSE (apparmor, chromium, grafana, ImageMagick, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, libsoup, libsoup2, libxslt, opensaml, rabbitmq-server, rubygem-rack-1_6, sqlite3, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (kernel, libfcgi, libraw, libsoup2.4, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.8, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-ibm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-oem-6.8, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.8, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.11, linux-hwe-6.11, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.11, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-azure, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.11, linux-azure-6.8, linux-azure-fips, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-realtime, linux-oem-6.11, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, python, python-scrapy, and ruby-carrierwave).

Mission Center 1.0.0 released

LWN

Version 1.0.0 of Mission Center, a system-monitoring application, has been released. Notable changes in this release include the addition of SMART data for SATA and NVMe devices, display of per-process network usage, as well as a redesigned Apps Page that provides more information about applications and processes. Mission Center's backend application for obtaining system data has been renamed from the Gatherer to Magpie, and is now available as a standalone executable and libraries that can be used by other applications.

Celebrating 20 Years of the OASIS Open Document Format

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The Document Foundation is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the ratification of the Open Document Format (ODF) as an OASIS standard.

Two decades after its approval in 2005, ODF is the only open standard for office documents, promoting digital independence, interoperability and content transparency worldwide. [...]

To celebrate this milestone, from today The Document Foundation will be publishing a series of presentations and documents on its blog that illustrate the unique features of ODF, tracing its history from the development and standardisation process through the activities of the Technical Committee for the submission of version 1.3 to ISO and the standardisation of version 1.4.

[$] The mystery of the Mailman 2 CVEs

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Many eyebrows were raised recently when three vulnerabilities were announced that allegedly impact GNU Mailman 2.1, since many folks assumed that it was no longer being supported. That's not quite the case. Even though version 3 of the GNU Mailman mailing-list manager has been available since 2015, and version 2 was declared (mostly) end of life (EOL) in 2020, there are still plenty of users and projects still using version 2.1.x. There is, as it turns out, a big difference between mostly EOL and actually EOL. For example: WebPros, the company behind the cPanel server and web-site-management platform, still maintains a port of Mailman 2.1.x to Python 3 for its customers and was quick to respond to reports of vulnerabilities. However, the company and upstream Mailman project dispute that the CVEs are valid.

Security updates for Wednesday

LWN
Security updates have been issued by Debian (glibc and libraw), Fedora (digikam, icecat, mingw-LibRaw, perl, perl-Devel-Cover, and perl-PAR-Packer), Red Hat (ghostscript, kernel, and kernel-rt), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (augeas, firefox, and java-11-openjdk), and Ubuntu (binutils, libxml2, and nodejs).

Meson 1.8.0 released

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Version 1.8.0 of the Meson build system has been released. Notable changes in this release include the ability to run rustdoc for Rust projects, support for the c2y and gnu2y compiler options, and a new argument (android_exe_type) that makes it possible to use the same meson.build file for Android and non-Android systems.