Welcome to the 26th issue of TMPDIR, a weekly newsletter covering Embedded Linux, IoT systems, and technology in general. Subscribe to future issues at https://tinyletter.com/tmpdir and pass it on to anyone else you think might be interested. Please send any tips or feedback to info@tmpdir.org.

Linux

Python PEP-0517 in the Yocto Project

PEP-0517 has been around for few years and adds a build-system independent format for source trees. As part of this, setup.py files go away in python modules, and wheels will be preferred where eggs was used in past. This change in core means that python packages in other OE layers need to adjust to use the new format. This is a good change in general, however many Yocto Python module recipes will need porting to the new packaging requirements. There is open call for help sent to OE developers mailing list to help with fixing these packages, currently there are approximately 50 packages in meta-python failing

Project Zero Metrics

Project zero, a team of security researchers at Google who study zero-day vulnerabilities in the hardware and software systems, has published a recent report detailing on how various companies and projects are doing. The report has seen encouraging trends in reduction of time to fix in past three years from 80 days to 52 days, but there still is room for improvement The full report is here.

Linux kernel and C11 standard

A recent proposal to make speculative safe list iterators spurred a discussion which highlighted the need to use a C99 feature such that an iterator must be declared outside the list traversing macro loops. So essentially "declare variable inside loops in local context" feature could make it easy. This perhaps will motivate the move to use either C99 or newer C standard for kernel programming. We might see kernel adopt C11 in 5.18+ who knows !!

Other

With some technology advances, things that used to be hard are now easy.

On the topic of documentation site generation, mdBook looks like a great tool for project documentation, and appears to be very compatible with extracting documentation from Git repos. It is part of the Rust project, but is generally useful, and attempts are being made to make the playground feature useful for other languages.

Quote for the week

In programming, if someone tells you “you’re overcomplicating it,” they’re either 10 steps behind you or 10 steps ahead of you. -- Andrew Clark ( React Core Team )

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