Codepope's Development Hell

Linux 3.14 lands: And another ten week dev cycle of Linux ends with the release of Linux 3.14. There’s a new realtime scheduler (deadline), event triggers for tracing, graphics driver updates (stablised Broadwell support, NVIDIA GK110 support, dynamic power management for newer AMD hardware), new TCP autocorking for better small packet handling and the usual gamut of driver improvements, patches and enhancements. For a good list, check LWN.net’s three part listing (1, 2, 3) (and if you are interested in Linux and don’t subscribe to LWN.

GNOME 3.12: And so GNOME 3.12 has arrived with updates all around. Over here at Codescaling, we’re looking forward to the improvements to HiDPI display support . We had been spoiled by Apple’s fairly smooth switch to HiDPI support but on Linux and Windows its all, surprisingly, a work in progress. Our GNOME desktop on a HiDPI dispay brings a range of font sizes to the screen, only some of which are appropriate.

Java 8 lands: So, after what feels like an age and after its been through the thresher of reality, Java 8 has officially arrived. What’s changed? Lambda expressions, functional interfaces, default methods for interfaces, streams, a new Date API, repeatable annotations, the Nashorn JavaScript engine… there’s a good quick intro to some the language features but theres going to be plenty of settling in to do. For all the docs go to the release notes, downloads can be found on the Java SE downloads page.

Python 3.4 is here: After many months of development, no changes to the language but lots of enhancements in the CPython implentation and standard library improvements, Python 3.4 has arrived. Before you dash off to the Python 3.4 download page, reflect for a moment that now Python now has pip as its bundled installer and should always be available or that there’s an OO API to filesystems (pathlib), a new async I/O API, support for enumeration types, fresh pickle and more and then go to the What’s new in Python 3.

Docker 0.9 unloads: Docker bumps its version number to Docker 0.9 and as it approaches version 1.0 makes a big change. Docker’s been pretty tightly tied to Linux Containers (LXC) technology to run applications packaged with it but in 0.9 there’s now execution drivers so the option to plug in any one of a range of isolation systems is now available. “OpenVZ, systemd-nspawn, libvirt-lxc, libvirt-sandbox, qemu/kvm, BSD Jails, Solaris Zones, and even good old chroot” are on Docker’s planned list with more to come from various projects.

Python 3.3.5 released: The latest update to Python 3.3 fixes two regressions, in zipimport and executing scripts and alleviates a potential denial of service. Mac users should pay specific attention as this 3.3.5 version now fully support OS X 10.9 fixing a bug which could cause “previous versions of Python to crash when typing in interactive mode”. Persona (non grata): Mozilla’s Persona is being “transferred to community ownership”. As yet another project is cut adrift from Mozilla in a fuzzy, vaguely friendly way, its worth making a note that you shouldn’t bet on Mozilla projects for the long term, unless they are called Firefox or run on a phone.

Node-RED updated: The most excellent graphical UI for connecting the Internet of Things (or just things in general), Node-RED has been updated to version 0.6. The announcement notes the process of separating the admin and server authentication to make deployment more robust has begun. Node-RED has nodes that accept HTTP connections and has a HTTP admin front end and previously these were all under one HTTP authentication mechanism - now the UI and nodes are more separate with the option to set a user/password for each.

LXC goes 1.0: Linux Containers, LXC, is now at version 1.0, a major milestone which also brings together and completes a lot of things that have been working their way through the Linux kernel, like support for unprivileged containers, long term stuff like a stable API – this’ll be supported for five years, bindings for Lua and Python3 (and Go and Ruby out-of-tree support), backing storage support for directories, btrfs, zfs and more, cloning, snapshotting… and you may wonder “Hey, doesn’t Docker do many of these things” and yes it does, so it’ll be interesting to watch how things all work out.

Systemd - the d is for dominates: The Debian Technical Committee decided that, after quite a bumpy process, that it would follow Fedora, Arch Linux, Mageia and openSUSE in planning to switch to systemd in the next release. The Debian change rippled down to Ubuntu where, probably sooner than anyone anticipated, Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu would switch too. Upstart, Canonical’s own init, will continue to be supported, especially as the forthcoming 14.

mqttwarn: Don’t want to run Node-RED but do want to route MQTT messages around? Jan-Piet Mens may have the application for you in the Python based mqttwarn, a pluggable framework which can subscribe to many MQTT topics and send them on to files, other MQTT systems, Twitter, SMTP, Redis, SQLite and Mac OS X notifications. He explains that the instigator for this was being introduced to Pushover, an iOS and Android notification app… which is now also supported by mqttwarn.