Programming and Kernel Development (Linux)

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 09, 2024

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.12.8.3.0 on CRAN: Upstream Bugfix

  widely used by (currently) 1144 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 34.2 million / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 583 times according

  Conrad released a new upstream bugfix yesterday (for a corner case with fftw3). We uploaded it yesterday too but it took a day for the hard-working CRAN maintainers to concur that the one (!) NOTE from reverse-dependency checking over 1100 packages was in a fact a false positve. And so it appeared on CRAN (very) early this morning. We also made a change removing a long-redundant setter for C++11 mode via the plugin. No other changes were made.

• Kernel Space

  • Peter Hutterer: libwacom and Huion/Gaomon devices

    TLDR: Thanks to José Exposito, libwacom 2.12 will support all [1] Huion and Gaomon devices when running on a 6.10 kernel. libwacom, now almost 13 years old, is a C library that provides a bunch of static information about graphics tablets that is not otherwise available by looking at the kernel device. Basically, it's a set of Hey Hi (AI) in the form of libwacom_get_num_buttons and so on. This is used by various components to be more precise about initializing devices, even though libwacom itself has no effect on whether the device works. It's only a library for historical reasons [2], if I were to rewrite it today, I'd probably ship libwacom as a set of static json or XML files with a specific schema.

• Python

  • Bastian Venthur: New python-debianbts in experimental

    Last month, I asked for help migrating python-debianbts to zeep, a SOAP library that would replace the now unmaintained pysimplesoap. The main blocker was the lack of a proper WSDL file provided by Debian’s BTS software, debbugs.

  • Python 3.13.0 beta 1 released

    Python 3.13 is still in development. This release, 3.13.0b1, is the first of four beta release previews of 3.13.

    Beta release previews are intended to give the wider community the opportunity to test new features and bug fixes and to prepare their projects to support the new feature release.

    We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to test with 3.13 during the beta phase and report issues found to the Python bug tracker as soon as possible. While the release is planned to be feature complete entering the beta phase, it is possible that features may be modified or, in rare cases, deleted up until the start of the release candidate phase (Tuesday 2024-07-30). Our goal is to have no ABI changes after beta 4 and as few code changes as possible after 3.13.0rc1, the first release candidate. To achieve that, it will be extremely important to get as much exposure for 3.13 as possible during the beta phase.

    Please keep in mind that this is a preview release and its use is not recommended for production environments.