Codepope's Development Hell

This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog

This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog

This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog

This article was imported from the original CodeScaling blog

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.