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Wednesday, April 10th, 2019
| Time |
Event |
| 5:05a |
[$] Positional-only parameters for Python
Arguments can be passed to Python functions by position or by
keyword—generally both. There are times when API designers may wish to
restrict some function parameters to only be passed by position, which is
harder than some think it should be in pure Python. That has led to a PEP
that is meant to make the situation better, but
opponents say it doesn't really do that;
it simply replaces one obscure mechanism with another. The PEP was
assigned a fairly well-known "BDFL delegate" (former BDFL Guido van Rossum), who has
accepted it, presumably for Python 3.8. | | 12:39p |
Microsoft research: A fork() in the road Here's a
research paper from Andrew Baumann, Jonathan Appavoo, Orran Krieger, and
Timothy Roscoe at Microsoft Research arguing that the fork()
system call is a fundamental design mistake. " As the designers and
implementers of operating systems, we should acknowledge that fork’s
continued existence as a first-class OS primitive holds back systems
research, and deprecate it. As educators, we should teach fork as a
historical artifact, and not the first process creation mechanism students
encounter." The discussion of better alternatives is limited,
though.
| | 3:01p |
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (samba and spip), openSUSE (samba), Red Hat (flash-plugin), Scientific Linux (kernel and openssh), SUSE (clamav and xen), and Ubuntu (apache2). | | 5:56p |
[$] A backdoor in a popular Ruby gem
Finding ways to put backdoors into various programming-language package
repositories (e.g. npm, PyPI, and now RubyGems) seems like it is becoming a new Olympic
sport or something. Every time you turn around, there is a
report of a new backdoor. It is now apparently Ruby's turn, with a
new report of a
remote-execution backdoor being inserted, briefly, into a popular gem that
is installed by some sites using the Ruby on
Rails web-application framework. | | 11:51p |
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 11, 2019
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 11, 2019 is available. |
|