EasyNAS 1.0 Beta 3 is out

This version is a bug fix version. Shutdown & Restart are working properly, network setting is working fine, Chinese language is now downloadable, Firmware updates is now faster, Addons installation works fine. You won’t need to download the ISO of the new version, just use the Update feature in the menu and you’ll get the new full new version including Beta-4 and the final release. You’ll see many updates for all components , update it when it’s available.

Linux 5.6-rc3

Fairly normal rc3 as far as I can tell. We've seen bigger, but we've
seen smaller ones too. Maybe this is slightly on the low side of
average at this time, which would make sense since this was a smaller
merge window. Anyway, too much noise in the signal to be sure either
way.

The overall stats look fairly regular too: about 55% drivers (staging,
sound, gpu, networking,  and usb look noticeable, with some noise
elsewhere). The bulk of the staging diff is actually the vsoc removal,
so that's nice.

Outside of drivers, we have the usual suspects: arch fixes (powerpc,
s390, x86, but also a late csky update that I couldn't find it in
myself to worry about). Filesystems (ext4 and btrfs) and networking.
And misc sprinkles of small fixes elsewhere.

See the appended shortlog for details,

             Linus

Programming: Thoughts From Jussi Pakkanen, Releases From Debian Developers, GSoC Projects and Python Leftovers

• Jussi Pakkanen: Open source does not have a reward mechanism for tedious

  Many software developers are creators and builders. They are drawn to problems of the first type. The fact that they are difficult is not a downside, it is a challenge to be overcome. It can even be a badge of merit which you can wave around your fellow developers. These projects include things like writing your own operating system or 3D game engine, writing device drivers that saturate the fastest of transfer links, lock free atomic parallelism, distributed file systems that store exabytes of data as well as embedded firmware that has less than 1 kilobyte of RAM. Working on these kinds of problems is rewarding on its own, even if the actual product never finishes or fails horribly when eventually launched. They are, in a single word, sexy. Most problems are not like that, but are instead the programming equivalent of ditch digging. They consist of a lot of hard work, which is not very exciting on its own but it still needs to be done. It is difficult to get volunteers to work on these kinds of problems and this is where the problem gets amplified in open source. Corporations have a very strong way to motivate people to work on tedious problems and it is called a paycheck. Volunteer driven open source development does not have a way to incentivise people in the same way. This is a shame, because the chances of success for any given software project (and startup) is directly proportional to the amount of tedious work people working on it are willing to do.

• ledger2beancount 2.0 released

  I released version 2.0 of ledger2beancount, a ledger to beancount converter.

• digest 0.6.25: Spookyhash bugfix

  digest creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects (using the md5, sha-1, sha-256, sha-512, crc32, xxhash32, xxhash64, murmur32, and spookyhash algorithms) permitting easy comparison of R language objects. It is a fairly widely-used package (currently listed at 889k monthly downloads with 255 direct reverse dependencies and 7340 indirect reverse dependencies) as many tasks may involve caching of objects for which it provides convenient general-purpose hash key generation. This release is a one issue fix. Aaron Lun noticed some issues when spookyhash is used in streaming mode. Kendon Bell, who also contributed spookyhash quickly found the issue which is a simple oversight. This was worth addressing in new release, so I pushed 0.6.25.

• Google announces 200 open-source mentors for the 2020 GSoC event

  With this year's Google Summer of Code event right around the corner, the organizers considered this to be the perfect time to announce the mentoring organizations for the participants. In this year's edition of GSoC, there will be 200 mentoring organizations, including 30 new teams. Read on to find out more details of this open-source event.

• Python 101 2nd Edition Sample Chapters

  I have put together some sample chapters for the 2nd edition of Python 101 which is coming out later this year. You can download the PDF version of these sample chapters here. Note that these chapters may have minor typos in them. Feel free to let me know if you find any bugs or errors.

• Python 3.7.6 : The SELinux python package.

  The tutorial for today is about the SELinux python package.

• Release 0.7.0 of GooCalendar

• Python in Production

  I’m missing a key part from the public Python discourse and I would like to help to change that. The other day I was listening to a podcast about running Python services in production. While I disagreed with some of the choices they made, it acutely reminded me about what I’ve been missing in the past years from the public Python discourse.

• Python Packaging Metadata

  Since this topic keeps coming up, I’d like to briefly share my thoughts on Python package metadata because it’s – as always – more complex than it seems. When I say metadata I mean mostly the version so I will talk about it interchangeably. But the description, the license, or the project URL are also part of the game.

• Better Python tracebacks with Rich

  One of my goals in writing Rich was to render really nice Python tracebacks. And now that feature has landed. I've never found Python tracebacks to be a great debugging aid beyond telling me what the exception was, and where it occurred. In a recent update to Rich, I've tried to refresh the humble traceback to give enough context to diagnose errors before switching back to the editor.

DPL Sam Hartman proves blackmail is alive and well in Debian

Debian has gone as far as humiliating and shaming people on a number of occasions to force them to bend over and submit to the monoculture. That may work with one or two victims at a time, as revealed in the Debian Christmas lynchings but the number of people expressing concerns about Israel appears to be too large for plain vanilla blackmailing.