Linux 4.18 RC2 Released From China

• Linux 4.18-rc2

  Another week, another -rc. I'm still traveling - now in China - but at least I'm doing this rc Sunday _evening_ local time rather than _morning_. And next rc I'll be back home and over rmy jetlag (knock wood) so everything should be back to the traditional schedule. Anyway, it's early in the rc series yet, but things look fairly normal. About a third of the patch is drivers (drm and s390 stand out, but here's networking and block updates too, and misc noise all over). We also had some of the core dma files move from drivers/base/dma-* (and lib/dma-*) to kernel/dma/*. We sometimes do code movement (and other "renaming" things) after the merge window simply because it tends to be less disruptive that way. Another 20% is under "tools" - mainly due to some selftest updates for rseq, but there's some turbostat and perf tooling work too. We also had some noticeable filesystem updates, particularly to cifs. I'm going to point those out, because some of them probably shouldn't have been in rc2. They were "fixes" not in the "regressions" sense, but in the "missing features" sense. So please, people, the "fixes" during the rc series really should be things that are _regressions_. If it used to work, and it no longer does, then fixing that is a good and proper fix. Or if something oopses or has a security implication, then the fix for that is a real fix. But if it's something that has never worked, even if it "fixes" some behavior, then it's new development, and that should come in during the merge window. Just because you think it's a "fix" doesn't mean that it really is one, at least in the "during the rc series" sense. Anyway, with that small rant out of the way, the rest is mostly arch updates (x86, powerpc, arm64, mips), and core networking. Go forth and test. Things look fairly sane, it's not really all that scary. Shortlog appended for people who want to scan through what changed. Linus

• Linux 4.18-rc2 Released With A Normal Week's Worth Of Changes

  Due to traveling in China, Linus Torvalds has released the Linux 4.18-rc2 kernel a half-day ahead of schedule, but overall things are looking good for Linux 4.18.

A GTK+ 3 update

• A GTK+ 3 update

  When we started development towards GTK+ 4, we laid out a plan that said GTK+ 3.22 would be the final, stable branch of GTK+ 3. And we’ve stuck to this for a while. I has served us reasonably well — GTK+ 3 stopped changing in drastic ways, which was well-received, and we are finally seeing applications moving from GTK+ 2.

• GTK+ 3.24 To Deliver Some New Features While Waiting For GTK4

  While the GNOME tool-kit developers have been hard at work on GTK4 roughly the past two years and have kept GTK3 frozen at GTK+ 3.22, a GTK+ 3.24 release is now being worked on to deliver some new features until GTK+ 4.0 is ready to be released. While GTK+ 4.0 is shaping up well and GTK+ 3.22 was planned to be the last GTK3 stable release, the developers have had second thoughts due to GTK+ 4 taking time to mature. Some limited new features are being offered up in the GTK+ 3.24 release to debut this September.

Finally: First stable release of KBibTeX for KDE Frameworks 5

After almost exactly two years of being work-in-progress, the first stable release of KBibTeX for KDE Frameworks 5 has been published! You can grab the sources at your local KDE mirror. Some distributions like ArchLinux already ship binary packages. After one beta and one release candidate, now comes the final release. You may wonder why this release gets version number 0.8.1 but not 0.8 as expected. This is simply due to the fact that I noticed a bug in CMakeLists.txt when computing version numbers which did not work if the version number just had two fields, i. e. no ‘patch’ version. As the code and the tag of 0.8 was already pushed, I had no alternative than to fix the problem and increase the version number. Otherwise, the ChangeLog (alternative view) is virtually unchanged compared to the last pre-release.

Today in Techrights

• Watchtroll’s Reaffirmed Hatred Towards Science and Technology, Shattering the Myth About Patent Law Firms Trying to ‘Help’ Innovation
• Nearly Half of Patent Applications at the EPO Are (at Least Partly) Software Patents, According to the EPO, and Not Many Patents Are European (Foreign, Not Domestic)
• Patent Factory Europe (PFE) is a Patent Troll’s Publicity Stunt, Attempting to Frame a Predator as the Small Businesses’ Friend and Ally
• Alice, Which Turns Four, Has Saved Billions of Dollars Previously Wasted on ‘Protection’ Money (Notably Patent Trolls)