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The Thunderbird project has announced that it is making its Release channel the default download beginning with the 135.0 release in March. This will move users to major monthly releases instead of the annual major Extended Support Release (ESR) that is the current default.

One of our goals for 2025 is to increase active installations on the release channel to at least 20% of the total installations. At last check, we had 29,543 active installations on the release channel, compared to 20,918 on beta, and 5,941 on daily. The release channel installations currently account for 0.27% of the 10,784,551 total active installations tracked on stats.thunderbird.net.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Go vendoring in Fedora; Rust 2024 edition; 6.14 Merge window; uretprobe(); FOSDEM keynote; Earthstar.
• Briefs: Git security; Ubuntu discussion; LWN EPUBs; Facebook moderation; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Version 6.9 of the Incus container and virtual-machine management system has been released. Changes include a command to provide virtual machine memory dumps, ability to set network ACLs for instances on bridged networks, and more.

For years we have had occasional requests to be able to receive LWN in a format for ebook readers. It took a while, but we are now happy to announce that all of LWN's feature content is available, to subscribers at the "professional hacker" level and above, in the EPUB format. To obtain the weekly edition as an EPUB file, just click the "Download EPUB" link in the left column. There is a separate RSS feed for the EPUB format as well. Any other feature content can be turned into an ebook by appending /epub to its URL.

We will also be creating special EPUB books at times. As an example of what is possible, our complete coverage from Kangrejos 2024 and the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit are available to all readers.

There are surely places where our EPUB books can be improved; please feel free to drop us a note (at lwn@lwn.net) with suggestions.

Security researcher RyotaK has shared a series of vulnerabilities that all have to do with how Git interfaces with external credential managers. In short, while Git guards against newline characters (\n) being injected into a repository's URL, some programming languages also treat carriage return characters (\r) as being newlines. Adding a carriage return to a repository's URL can cause Git and the credential manager to disagree on how the URL should be parsed, ultimately resulting in Git credentials being sent to the wrong host. Malicious repositories could include Git submodules with malformed URLs, triggering the bug. Only password-based authentication with an external credential manager is vulnerable to this attack; SSH-based authentication remains secure. The Git project has chosen to consider this a vulnerability in Git, given the large amount of external software affected. The project has fixed the bug on its end by releasing updates for all supported versions that ban carriage returns in URLs entirely.

Affected software includes GitHub Desktop, Git LFS, and possibly other Git utilities:

Since Git itself doesn't use .lfsconfig file, specifying the URL that contains the newline character in .lfsconfig causes Git LFS to insert the newline character into the message, while bypassing [...] Git's validation.

Earthstar is a privacy-oriented, offline-first, LGPL-licensed database intended to support distributed applications. Unlike other distributed storage libraries, it focuses on providing mutable data with human-meaningful names and modification times, which gives it an interface similar to many non-distributed key-value databases. Now, the developers are looking at switching to a new synchronization protocol — one that is general enough that it might see wider adoption.

Ubuntu will be moving its "official realtime communications channels" from IRC to Matrix, beginning March 1, 2025, following a discussion on the ubuntu-devel mailing list.

"Official" communication, such as making realtime requests of privileged Ubuntu developer teams, could be expected to be actioned if requested on Matrix only. Similarly, you can consider your social responsibility to other developers in relation to your work in Ubuntu development to be fulfilled if you are present on that platform. And Canonical will follow in its requirement for its employed Ubuntu developers to be present on that agreed platform during their working hours.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bzip2, gimp:2.8, keepalived, mariadb:10.11, mariadb:10.5, python-jinja2, and redis), Debian (iperf3, libtar, and pdns-recursor), Fedora (abseil-cpp, dotnet8.0, dotnet9.0, golang, libsoup3, and vaultwarden), Oracle (gimp:2.8, iperf3, keepalived, kernel, redis:7, and unbound), Red Hat (libsoup), SUSE (amazon-ssm-agent, go1.22, go1.23, iperf, java-21-openjdk, nginx, openvpn, and python311-asteval), and Ubuntu (kernel, libmicrodns, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, 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-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-raspi, linux, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-ibm, linux-lowlatency, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.8, linux-raspi, linux, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-oem-6.11, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-oem-6.8, rsync, and tcpreplay).

This year's edition of the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) begins on February 1 in Brussels. The event is widely regarded as one of the most important open-source conferences. One of the reasons that FOSDEM is held in high esteem by the community is its non-commercial nature. It does accept sponsors, but sponsorships come with few perks and no "pay-for-play" speaking slots. Thus, the scheduling of a keynote by Jack Dorsey⁠—⁠primarily known for his role in co-founding Twitter, and currently CEO and chairman of FOSDEM sponsor Block, Inc.⁠—⁠raised eyebrows and led to plans for a protest. The keynote has since been removed from the schedule, but there are still a number of lingering questions.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (git and openjpeg2), Mageia (virtualbox), SUSE (podman), and Ubuntu (clamav, frr, libreoffice, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, and quagga).

The DistroWatch January 27 edition includes this interesting tidbit:

Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labeled groups associated with Linux as being "cybersecurity threats". Any posts mentioning DistroWatch and multiple groups associated with Linux and Linux discussions have either been shut down or had many of their posts removed.

We've been hearing all week from readers who say they can no longer post about Linux on Facebook or share links to DistroWatch. Some people have reported their accounts have been locked or limited for posting about Linux.

One can only hope that this is a mistake that will be resolved soon.

The Go language is designed to make it easy for developers to import other Go packages and compile everything into a static binary for simple distribution. Unfortunately, this complicates things for those who package Go programs for Linux distributions, such as Fedora, that have guidelines which require dependencies to be packaged separately. Fedora's Go special interest group (SIG) is asking for relief and a loosening of the bundling guidelines to allow Go packagers to bundle dependencies into the packages that need them, otherwise known as vendoring. So far, the participants in the discussion have seemed largely in favor of the idea.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (git-lfs, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel, and python-jinja2), Debian (git and git-lfs), Fedora (buildah, chromium, containers-common, freeipa, glibc, golang, mediawiki, pam-u2f, podman, and rsync), Mageia (glibc, iperf, openssl, phpmyadmin, and poppler), Oracle (firefox, git-lfs, grafana, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel, python-jinja2, and redis:6), and SUSE (chromium, go1.22-1.22.11-1.1, go1.23-1.23.5-1.1, go1.24-1.24rc2-1.1, java-11-openjdk, kernel, libopenssl-3-devel, libQt6Bluetooth6, nodejs18, nodejs20, python311-azure-storage-blob, qt6-connectivity, and ruby3.4-rubygem-nokogiri-1.18.2-1.1).

Last year, LWN examined the changes lined up for Rust's 2024 edition. Now, with the edition ready to be stabilized in February, it's time to look back at the edition process and see what was successfully adopted, which new changes were added, and what still remains to work on. A surprising amount of new work was proposed, implemented, and stabilized during the year.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and python-django), Fedora (git-lfs and pam-u2f), Mageia (golang), Red Hat (java-11-openjdk with Extended Lifecycle Support, java-17-openjdk, and java-21-openjdk), SUSE (cheat, dante, docker-stable, grafana, and kernel), and Ubuntu (cacti, cyrus-imapd, HTMLDOC, and PCL).

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.12.11, 6.6.74, 6.1.127, and 5.15.177 stable kernels. They all contain important fixes, as is the usual case.

A "uretprobe" is a dynamic, user-space tracepoint injected by the kernel into a running process; this document tersely describes their use. Among other things, uretprobes are used by the perf utility to time function calls. The 6.11 kernel saw a significant change to uretprobes that improved their performance, but that change is also creating trouble for some users. The best way to solve the problem is not entirely clear.

As of this writing, just over 4,300 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for the 6.14 release. Many of the pull requests this time around include remarks saying that activity has been relatively low this time around, presumably due to the holidays. So those 4,300 changesets are probably closer to the merge-window halfway point than usual. Much of the work merged thus far looks more like incremental improvements than major new initiatives, but there still have been a number of interesting changes in the mix.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (redis:6), Debian (frr and git-lfs), Fedora (SDL2_sound and webkit2gtk4.0), Gentoo (firefox, GPL Ghostscript, libgsf, libuv, PHP, Qt, QtWebEngine, and Yubico pam-u2f), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable), SUSE (helmfile, nvidia-modprobe, qt6-webengine, ruby3.4-rubygem-actioncable-8.0-8.0.1-1.1, ruby3.4-rubygem-actionpack-8.0-8.0.1-1.1, ruby3.4-rubygem-actiontext-8.0-8.0.1-1.1, ruby3.4-rubygem-actionview-8.0-8.0.1-1.1, ruby3.4-rubygem-activejob-8.0-8.0.1-1.1, ruby3.4-rubygem-activerecord-8.0-8.0.1-1.1, ruby3.4-rubygem-activestorage-8.0-8.0.1-1.1, ruby3.4-rubygem-rails-8.0-8.0.1-1.1, and ruby3.4-rubygem-railties-8.0-8.0.1-1.1), and Ubuntu (bluez, openjpeg2, and python-django).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Rsync vulnerability; Going mouseless; Commit IDs; 6.13 Development statistics; Python string formating; Python None-aware operators.
• Briefs: Kernel 6.13; Dillo 3.2.0; GDB 16.1; OpenVox; Wine 10.0; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.