Codepope's Development Hell

Docker 0.7 unloading: With Docker 0.7, the Docker developers have made a big leap in Linux coverage. (If you are new to Docker, read the introduction to it I did for the Linux Foundation). Under the covers, Docker has used storage drivers to maintain images on disk, but up till now they’d needed a patched Linux kernel for that to work. A patch from Red Hat has changed that though and adds “DEVICEMAPPER”, a storage driver which used copy-on-write LVM snapshots and doesn’t need a patched kernel, to the list of storage drivers.

Python 3.4’s beta days: The first beta of Python 3.4 has arrived and it has got the good stuff. Pathlib lets coders work with pure paths or filesystem dependent paths with the selection of the latter taken care of for them. There’s a standardised enum module along with new statistics, asyncio and tracemalloc modules. Throw in a new pickling protocol, new string and binary hashing algorithms, a C API for custom memory allocators and standardise on pip as a packaging format and you are talking a tasty new Python due to land at the end of February 2014.

RHEL 6.5 docks?: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 has been released and as is usual for the point releases of RHEL, has a number of enhancements like Precision Time Protocol support (for microsecond synchronisation accuracy), better network data for admins, GlusterFS integration for KVM and NVMe (PCI SSD) support. Mentioned in the announcement is Docker, the container deployment platform, but oddly there appears to be no mention of it in the technical notes or release notes.

Facebook Rocks: Another database open sourced by Facebook? Yup, and demonstrating that the term “database” covers a lot of ground, Facebook’s latest is RocksDB, an embedded key-value store for those userfacing situations where you need a lot of woosh, little latency. Lead developer, Dhurba Borthakur, explains in a blog posting that RocksDB is based on Google’s LevelDB and is tuned to run on many-core servers which making efficient use of storage to cut down on write wear.

OpenSUSE 13.1 lands: The openSUSE folks have been busy and the result of their work is now available in the form of openSUSE 13.1. We shall have to see how the stabilisation work, including getting btrfs up to “everyday” (but not default) quality, pays off in practice. The other highlights of the release include OpenStack Havana, latest Apache, MySQL, MariaDB, Ruby 2 on Rails 4 and PHP 5.4.2. On the ARM front, there’s the start of AArch64 (64bit ARM) support and a new Raspberry Pi build.

Red Hat and Google have announced version 1.0’s of their long baking new languages, Ceylon 1.0.0 and Dart SDK 1.0. With three years of work on Ceylon and at least two years behind Dart, are they worth looking at? Red Hat’s Ceylon comes from Gavin King’s team at the company who’ve been working for around three years on a language which initially targeted the Java virtual machine but now also can generate JavaScript.

Facebook, in their now traditional goal of taking on big data problems, solving them and then open sourcing the result, have open-sourced Presto, a distributed SQL query engine “optimized for ad-hoc analysis at interactive speed”. This type of app is designed for the folks who need to work out what people who like chips and cheese and rock but dont like bagels or opera also have, statistically, in common. Its a simple enough question, but when you get up to Facebook scale, its a hard question to answer.

Fedora 20 enters Beta: Fedora 20 has entered beta so its time to step up that testing as there’s lots of goodies in “Heisenbug”. Top items include ARM as a primary architecture, the end of sendmail and syslog as defaults, fresh tools and more. Thats all in the announcement along with pointers on where to go for your downloads and further information on the GNOME 3.10 powered Fedora 20 beta.

4 Years of Go: Time flies when a language develops and Go is no exception as it celebrated its fourth year noting some of the projects built in Go (Docker, Packer, NSQ, JuJu and more) and Go users (CloudFlare, SoundCloud, ngrok, Poptip, Splice and obviously Google). The Docker folk have presented why they use Go, both the good and the bad, covering what doesn’t work well for them too.

Slackware updated: The venerable Slackware Linux has had its annual update for 2013 announced by Patrick Volkerding and a fine update it appears to be. A 3.10.17 Linux kernel, X11R7.7 X Windows, 64-bit UEFI installation support and updates across the board for dev tools, applications, desktops (Xfce 4.10.1 and KDE 4.10.5) and more. And Slackware ARM 14.1 is also available. MariaDB 10.0 goes Beta: As MariaDB, the community-supported and developed MySQL fork, branches away from MySQL with version 10.