What is it like to be a Debian Project Leader (DPL), or a former one? According to Andreas Tille, who stepped down this year after two consecutive terms as DPL, you'd have to be one to know. At the recent MiniDebConf in Winterthur, Switzerland, Tille spoke about what he learned while serving as DPL, some of the initiatives he led, mistakes that he made, and his thoughts on the general resolution (GR) on large language model (LLM) usage in Debian.

Sean Whitton has announced that the original fix for an arbitrary code execution flaw in Emacs (CVE-2024-53920) was incomplete. Bas Alberts discovered that viewing or editing untrusted files in modes other than Emacs's Lisp mode can also result in arbitrary code execution.

This problem affects all Emacs versions affected by CVE-2024-53920. This means Emacs 24 and newer, and possibly also older versions.

A minimal fix, attached, is queued up for release with Emacs 31.2. We (the Emacs upstream maintainers) don't expect to backport the fix to older Emacs releases ourselves.

LWN covered the original vulnerability in December 2024.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (389-ds-base, apr-util, coreutils, freerdp, git-lfs, glib2, gstreamer1-plugins-base, kernel, libkcapi, nginx, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, osbuild-composer, perl-YAML-Syck, postgresql16-postgis, ruby, ruby4.0, ruby:3.3, and vim), Debian (jbig2dec, kamailio, nginx, spip, and xorg-server), Fedora (baresip, bind, bluez, bubblewrap, chirp, chromium, cockpit, composer, corosync, darktable, dokuwiki, elixir, exiv2, expat, firefox, freerdp, freerdp2, gdk-pixbuf2, gegl04, golang-x-perf, grpcurl, kernel, kernel-headers, libevent, libmongocrypt, libpcap, libre, libsoup3, memcached, mingw-expat, mingw-openexr, mongo-c-driver, mrtg, nagios-plugins, nsd, nss, openssl, openvpn, PackageKit, pdns-recursor, perl-Net-OAuth, perl-XML-Bare, php-pecl-mongodb2, python-asteval, python-pip, rclone, rest, rust-hickory-net, rust-hickory-proto, rust-hickory-resolver, rust-ppmd-rust, rust-webbrowser, srt, syncthing, tar, tkimg, and valkey), Gentoo (Chromium, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi and Ruby), Mageia (bind, ffmpeg, glibc, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, librabbitmq, perl-Catalyst-Plugin-Static-Simple, perl-Imager, tor, and xz), Oracle (389-ds:1.4, ansible-core, apr-util, coreutils, freerdp, git-lfs, glib2, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gzip, httpd:2.4, image-builder, java-21-openjdk, kernel, mrtg, nginx, osbuild-composer, perl-DBI, postgresql16-postgis, python-lxml, python3.12-lxml, redis:6, and vim), SUSE (389-ds, ansible-core, ansible-creator, azure-storage-azcopy, cargo-audit, chromedriver, chromium, clamav, containerized-data-importer1.65, containerized-data-importer1.66, curl, dracut, ffmpeg-4, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, helm, java-1_8_0-ibm, jupyter-nbconvert, kernel, libpng16, libusb-1_0, libvirt, multipath-tools, NetworkManager, opensc, openssl-3, perl-Authen-SASL, perl-HTML-FormHandler, perl-Mojolicious, perl-Protocol-HTTP2, python-jwcrypto, python-sqlparse, python-tornado6, python313-geopy, python313-modelscope, python313-modelscope-hub, python313-pypdf, python315, rpcbind, sshamble, strongswan, tomcat, ucode-intel, and wget), and Ubuntu (civetweb, ffmpeg, and urwid).

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the 7.2.6, 6.18.52, 6.12.110, 6.6.157, 6.1.188, 5.15.221, 5.10.270 stable kernels.

According to Kroah-Hartman, this batch may set a record for the number of patches with more than 9,000 in total between them. There are more than 1,800 patches in 7.2.6 alone. Users of these kernels are, of course, advised to upgrade.

Just a reminder that prices for LWN subscriptions will increase after September 15. Until then, the older rate still applies. See this article for details on this change. Thanks, yet again, to all of our subscribers for your support — that is what keeps LWN going.

The 7.3-rc3 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus said: "Another fairly large rc release, and again one with a bigger filesystem footprint that we usually see."

All of the videos from the EuroPython 2026 conference, held in Kraków, Poland from July 13 through July 19, are now online along with a recap of the event from conference organizers.

Kernel developers do a lot of kernel builds. Since the kernel is not a small program, those builds can take a fair amount of time, even on a fast machine. The kernel also has a complex build system; it is probably fair to say that few developers truly understand it, and fewer still are willing to try to improve it. Lorenzo Stoakes, armed with LLM-based assistance, decided to give it a try, though, and has managed to reduce the time it takes to build a kernel — and not by a small amount.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.5 and 6.18.51 stable kernels. There are more than 550 patches in each with fixes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (apr-util and qt6-qt5compat), Debian (libevent and ruby-rack), Fedora (bluez, corosync, curl, dokuwiki, grpcurl, libevent, and rest), Oracle (gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, perl-DBI, python-urllib3, qt5-qtbase, qt6-qt5compat, and thunderbird), Red Hat (osbuild-composer), SUSE (azure-storage-azcopy, chromedriver, corosync, ggml-devel, helm, kernel, libmariadb-devel, libzypp, zypper, opensc, php7, tomcat10, and waylyrics), and Ubuntu (apache2, beets, glibc, kissfft, libebml, linux-nvidia-6.17, php8.1, php8.3, php8.5, and python2.7, python3.4, python3.5, python3.6, python3.7, python3.8, python3.9, python3.10, python3.11, python3.12, python3.14).

The Forgejo software-forge project has announced the release of versions 16.0.4 and 15.0.8, which fixes two security vulnerabilities. One is a critical flaw that would allow remote-code execution (RCE):

When generating a new repository from a template repository, Forgejo clones the template repository, removes the .git folder, performs variable template expansion on files listed in .forgejo/template, and initializes a new git repository. During this process, variable template expansion could be misused in order to create a new .git folder, which git would adopt and incorporate during its initialization of a new git repository. A malicious template repository could be used to read arbitrary data from the Forgejo host, and to execute arbitrary processes on the Forgejo host, as a remote code execution attack. To address this issue, after variable expansion is completed, any existing .git folder is removed from the directory before the git repository is initialized.

The project recommends upgrading to the latest version as soon as possible.

PostgreSQL 19 was expected to be released in September, in keeping with the database project's longstanding tradition of a major release every year. However, some late-breaking concerns about several of the features slated for inclusion has some developers worried about the quality of the release. On August 25, PostgreSQL contributor Robert Haas sent an email with the subject "scary patch contest" about several patches that have required an unusually large number of bug fixes leading up to the release, which has raised questions about their readiness for a stable release. One of the patches has been reverted, but several are still under heavy revision, and an extra beta release has been slotted in to allow for additional testing.

Version 1.13 of the Julia programming language has been released. Highlights include faster precompilation of packages, improvements to Julia's REPL, and Juliaup, a graphical interface for the Julia version manager. A full list of changes can be found in the release notes. LWN covered Julia 1.12 in November 2025.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (389-ds-base, ansible-core, buildah, expat, glib2, gpsd, gpsd-minimal, gzip, kernel, kernel-rt, opentelemetry-collector, osbuild-composer, perl-DBI, python-lxml, python3.12-lxml, qt5-qtbase, thunderbird, valkey, vim, and xz), Debian (pyasn1), Fedora (darktable, freeipa, freerdp2, gdk-pixbuf2, GitPython, libsoup3, openssl, perl-Net-DNS, rust-ppmd-rust, samba, and valkey), Mageia (ceph, firefox, nss, perl-DBI, thunderbird, and wget), Oracle (389-ds-base, buildah, expat, git-lfs, glib2, glibc, gpsd, gpsd-minimal, grafana-pcp, kernel, libssh, nginx, perl-GD, python3.14-cryptography, redis:7, skopeo, thunderbird, valkey, xmlrpc-c, and xz), Slackware (xz), SUSE (bzip2, cpio, curl, dracut, fuse-overlayfs, golang-github-vpenso-prometheus_slurm_exporter, helm, java-1_8_0-ibm, kbfs, kernel, kernel-devel, libopenslide-devel, libsoup, libssh2_org, libusb-1_0, libvirt, libzypp, zypper, mcphost, multipath-tools, NetworkManager, opensc, openssl-3, perl-Net-DNS, python-aiohttp, python-Authlib, python-pip, python-sqlparse, python313-dnspython, python313-idna, rpcbind, sssd, strongswan, systemd, tomcat11, ucode-intel, and wget), and Ubuntu (dotnet8, dotnet10, ffmpeg, flatpak, netty, and perl).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Rust's never type; Debian and CERN; memory tiering; testing multithreaded Python; fixing TCMalloc; Typst.
• Briefs: Rustls; Asahi Linux; Buildroot 2026.08; Grml 2026.09; Audacity 4.0; Jellyfin 12.0; LibreOffice Base; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Joe Birr-Pixton has written a blog post reflecting on a decade of the Rustls TLS-library project and looking ahead to the upcoming 0.24 release and an eventual 1.0 release.

Rustls began with a first commit on May 2, 2016. Progress was quick: a month later, on June 5, it could interoperate with most sites on the web. The first release, 0.1.0, followed on August 27, 2016 – less than four months after the first commit.

[...] From the 0.1.0 release, the project moved through a long series of releases over the following eight years, building out functionality, hardening and refining the API. That sequence of release lines culminated in 0.23, released on February 29, 2024.

The 0.23 release line has been a stable one: in the time since, it has seen 43 non-breaking releases. That stability didn't come with stagnation. The 0.23 line delivered a wide range of important features, including a FIPS-certified cryptography option, certificate compression, Encrypted ClientHello, post-quantum cryptography, and performance improvements.

Heiko Tietze has published a blog post summarizing the results of a recent survey about the use of LibreOffice's database application, Base. 455 people participated in the survey, including more than 330 who use Base on Linux, with use cases ranging from maintaining records of personal media such as CDs or DVDs to use enterprise-resource planning (ERP) and finance. Of course, users had many ideas how to improve the application:

The majority asks for improvements to the user interface with less clutter and a more attractive design. The workflow and user experience should become either simplified or more powerful, depending on the expertise and the scenario. For example, an elaborate search function is something that many people expect. [...]

Almost the same number of answers requests bug fixes, improvements to stability, and better performance. Issues with queries, forms, and reports were mentioned equally often. In this regard, many replies suggest to remove the Java dependencies.

Typst is a system for typesetting documents into various formats: PDF, SVG, PNG, and, in progress, HTML. It is adept at handling technical material, and is often considered to be an eventual LaTeX replacement. We last looked in on Typst a year ago, when it had reached version 0.13. A new version, 0.15, was released in June with lots of new features, including support for variable fonts, MathML, multiple bibliographies, and more. Typst is free, Apache-2.0-licensed software, programmed in Rust.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (expat, glib2, microcode_ctl, mrtg, pam, redis, thunderbird, and valkey), Debian (fort-validator, gst-plugins-base1.0, kernel, and slurm-wlm), Fedora (complyctl, libevent, openvpn, and tar), Mageia (dovecot and spice-vdagent), Red Hat (ignition, opentelemetry-collector, and osbuild-composer), SUSE (amazon-ssm-agent, aws-nitro-enclaves-cli, bzip2, cadvisor, chromium, curl, distribution-registry, emacs, freeciv, fuse-overlayfs, gh, google-guest-agent, GraphicsMagick, hauler, insighttoolkit-devel, java-17-openjdk, libidn, libusb-1_0, libvirt, libvncserver, libzypp, zypper, lkl, lxd, multipath-tools, NetworkManager, perl-Net-DNS, perl-URI, python, python-authlib, python-sqlparse, python-tornado, python3, rpcbind, supergfxctl, systemd, terraform-provider-null, ucode-intel, wget, wireshark, and xen), and Ubuntu (curl, ffmpeg, glibc, hsqldb1.8.0, imagemagick, perl, and vim).

A function's return type is supposed to indicate the kind of data that it produces. Rust's "never" type, which is denoted by an exclamation mark ("!"), is the type the language uses to mark a function that never returns and other places where a value can never occur. For a long time, the never type was used internally by the compiler, but was considered an unstable feature. On August 24, after more than two years of work, Rust-compiler-contributor "waffle" finally managed to stabilize the type. It took so long, in part, because it involved a small breaking change to previous Rust editions, which the compiler maintainers needed to ensure did not impact much real code.