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Tuesday, January 8th, 2019
| Time |
Event |
| 12:50a |
Neary: How Should I Run My Community Elections? On the Red Hat community blog, Dave Neary writes about community governance and, in particular, how to choose who gets a vote, who can run, and how to decide a winner when electing a leader or council. He summarizes a number of different options that he has encountered with an eye toward avoiding the deep rat-hole conversations that picking a way to run elections can engender. " Defining the activity metric and minimum bar for what qualifies as participation can become contentious, mainly because where you draw the line will be arbitrary, and will omit people who you want to include, or include people who you want to omit. For example, if you set the bar at the minimum contribution level of one commit to the project, you omit all whose contributions are significant but not code related. The typical fear is ballot stuffing or cohort effects — where large companies will dominate the representative bodies by having a large voting bloc, or where friends of candidates (or people with a certain agenda) will pass the low bar to become voters just to vote for their candidate." | | 3:19p |
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libav), Fedora (krb5), Red Hat (source-to-image), and SUSE (gpg2, libgit2, and libsoup). | | 4:43p |
Bash 5.0 released
Version 5.0 of the Bash shell has been released.
"The most notable new features are several new shell variables: BASH_ARGV0,
EPOCHSECONDS, and EPOCHREALTIME. The `history' builtin can remove ranges of
history entries and understands negative arguments as offsets from the end
of the history list. There is an option to allow local variables to inherit
the value of a variable with the same name at a preceding scope. There is
a new shell option that, when enabled, causes the shell to attempt to
expand associative array subscripts only once (this is an issue when they
are used in arithmetic expressions). The `globasciiranges' shell option
is now enabled by default; it can be set to off by default at configuration
time." | | 10:09p |
[$] A new free-software forge: sr.ht
Many projects have adopted the "GitHub style" of development over the last
few years, though, of course, there are some high-profile exceptions that
still use patches and mailing lists. Many projects are leery of putting
all of their project metadata into a proprietary service, with limited
means of usefully retrieving it should that be necessary, which is why
GitLab (which is at least "open core") has been gaining some traction. A recently announced
effort looks to kind of bridge the gap; Drew DeVault's sr.ht ("the hacker's forge")
combines elements of
both styles of development in a "100% free and open source software
forge". It looks to be an ambitious project, but it
may also suffer from a lack of "social network" effects, which is part of
what sustains GitHub as the forge of choice today, it seems. |
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