cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 72 Posts
  • 340 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMtoLinux@lemmy.mlGIMP 3.0.0 tagged
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    2 days ago

    Could anybody in short explain, what I have to understand from “it’s tagged”?

    Git is the most popular version control system, which lets developers track changes to software source code. A “tag” applies a name (or version number) to a specific point in the history.

    The commit shows that there was a longer with 3.0.0 tag before and now its just 3.0.0

    The link goes to a commit which is tagged GIMP_3_0_0, and shows the change made in this commit. This commit happens to change the version line in a file called meson.build - this file configures Meson, which is used to build GIMP. The version is being changed from 3.0.0-RC3+git to 3.0.0. The string “RC3” in the previous version number is short for “release candidate 3”, and “git” here means that there were additional changes since “release candidate 3” was released.

    What does that tell us? :D

    So far the news and downloads pages still haven’t been updated, but the version being changed to 3.0.0 and this commit being tagged tells us that GIMP 3.0.0 is about to be released: official binaries and an announcement about it can be expected to appear very soon.

    The tag means no more changes will be included in 3.0.0; if some show-stopping bug were discovered now, the version number would be incremented to 3.0.1 rather than to include a fix in 3.0.0. (Technically, a tag can be updated/replaced, but by convention it is not.)




  • Clickbait. The VP Engineering for Ubuntu made a post that he was looking into using the Rust utils for Ubuntu and has been daily driving them and encouraged others to try

    It’s by no means certain this will be done.

    Here is that post. It isn’t certain to happen, but he doesn’t only say that he is daily driving them. He says his goal is to make them the default in 25.10:

    My immediate goal is to make uutils’ coreutils implementation the default in Ubuntu 25.10, and subsequently in our next Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, if the conditions are right.



  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mltolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldthe perfect browser
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    5 days ago

    The three currently-maintained engines which (at their feature intersection) effectively define what “the web” is today are Mozilla’s Gecko, Apple’s WebKit, and Google’s Blink.

    The latter two are both descended from KHTML, which came from the Konquerer browser which was first released as part of KDE 2.0 in 2000, and thus both are LGPL licensed.

    After having their own proprietary engine for over two decades, Microsoft stopped developing it and switched to Google’s fork of Apple’s fork of KDE’s free software web engine.

    Probably Windows will replace its kernel with Linux eventually too, for better or worse :)

    How else are Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi and co getting away with building proprietary layers on top of a copyleft dependency?

    They’re allowed to because the LGPL (unlike the normal GPL) is a weak copyleft license.














  • I trust Debian developers far more

    i definitely agree with you here :)

    I think it was poppler or evince that decided they were going to enforce the no-copy-and-paste bit you can set on pdfs. Debian patched it out.

    I found the notion of free software implementing PDF DRM rather hilarious, so I had to know more. First I found this help page which confirms that evince does have code which implements PDF restrictions, but it says that its override_restrictions option is enabled by default.

    But I wondered: when did this get implemented? and was it ever enabled by default? So, I went digging, and here are the answers:

    • in May 2005, the restrictions were implemented in evince in this commit
    • in September 2005, the override_restrictions option was added in this commit, after discussion in bug #305818
    • in December 2006 bug #382700 was opened, requesting that override_restrictions be enabled by default
    • in January 2008, the default changed in this commit - but only after someone pointed out that the PDF spec does not in fact require the restrictions to be enforced. (The spec says “It is up to the implementors of PDF consumer applications to respect the intent of the document creator by restricting user access”) 😂

    I don’t see any indication that Debian patched this out during the time when evince had it enabled by default, but I’m sure they would have eventually if GNOME hadn’t come to their senses :)

    I’ve seen Mozilla decide they were going to enforce their trademarks. They carved out special exceptions for various distros but that still would have meant you would have to rename Firefox if you were to fork Debian. Debian had none of it.

    In my opinion both sides of the Debian–Mozilla trademark dispute were actually pretty reasonable and certainly grounded in good intentions. Fortunately they resolved it eventually, with Mozilla relaxing their restrictions in 2016 (while still reserving the right to enforce their trademark against derivatives which make modifications they find unreasonable):

    Mozilla recognizes that patches applied to Iceweasel/Firefox don’t impact the quality of the product.

    Patches which should be reported upstream to improve the product always have been forward upstream by the Debian packagers. Mozilla agrees about specific patches to facilitate the support of Iceweasel on architecture supported by Debian or Debian-specific patches.

    More generally, Mozilla trusts the Debian packagers to use their best judgment to achieve the same quality as the official Firefox binaries.

    In case of derivatives of Debian, Firefox branding can be used as long as the patches applied are in the same category as described above.