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[$] Disabling Python's lazy imports from the command line

2026-03-11 06:17:12

The advent of lazy imports in the Python language is upon us, now that PEP 810 ("Explicit lazy imports") was accepted by the steering council and the feature will appear in the upcoming Python 3.15 release in October. There are a number of good reasons, performance foremost, for wanting to defer spending—perhaps wasting—the time to do an import before a needed symbol is used. However, there are also good reasons not to want that behavior, at least in some cases. The tension between those two positions is what led to an earlier PEP rejection, but it is also playing into a recent discussion of the API used to control lazy imports.

SUSE may be for sale, again

2026-03-11 04:47:48

Reuters is reporting that private-equity firm EQT may be looking to sell SUSE:

EQT has hired investment bank Arma Partners to sound out a group of private equity investors for a possible sale of the company, said the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential matters. The ​deliberations are at an early stage and there is no certainty that EQT will ​proceed with a transaction, the sources said.

SUSE has traded hands a number of times over the years. Most recently it was acquired by EQT in 2018, was listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2021, and then taken private again by EQT in August 2023.

[$] Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

2026-03-10 21:23:57

Debian is the latest in an ever-growing list of projects to wrestle (again) with the question of LLM-generated contributions; the latest debate stared in mid-February, after Lucas Nussbaum opened a discussion with a draft general resolution (GR) on whether Debian should accept AI-assisted contributions. It seems to have, mostly, subsided without a GR being put forward or any decisions being made, but the conversation was illuminating nonetheless.

Security updates for Tuesday

2026-03-10 21:13:38

Security updates have been issued by Debian (imagemagick), Fedora (chromium, matrix-synapse, mingw-zlib, perl-Net-CIDR, polkit, and rust-pythonize), Mageia (coturn, firefox, and thunderbird), Oracle (delve, git-lfs, gnutls, go-rpm-macros, image-builder, kernel, libsoup, nfs-utils, nginx:1.24, osbuild-composer, postgresql, thunderbird, udisks2, and valkey), Red Hat (grafana, image-builder, and opentelemetry-collector), SUSE (c3p0 and mchange-commons, corepack24, go1, ImageMagick, python-Flask, tomcat, tomcat10, tomcat11, virtiofsd, and weblate), and Ubuntu (apache2 and yara).

[$] Inspecting and modifying Python types during type checking

2026-03-09 21:53:00

Python has a unique approach to static typing. Python programs can contain type annotations, and even access those annotations at run time, but the annotations aren't evaluated by default. Instead, it is up to external programs to ascribe meaning to those annotations. The annotations themselves can be arbitrary Python expressions, but in practice usually involve using helpers from the built-in typing module, the meanings of which external type-checkers mostly agree upon. Yet the type system implicitly defined by the typing module and common type-checkers is insufficiently powerful to model all of the kinds of dynamic metaprogramming found in real-world Python programs. PEP 827 ("Type Manipulation") aims to add additional capabilities to Python's type system to fix this, but discussion of the PEP has been of mixed sentiment.

digiKam 9.0.0 released

2026-03-09 21:13:11

Version 9.0.0 of the digiKam photo-management system has been released. "This major version introduces groundbreaking improvements in performance, usability, and workflow efficiency, with a strong focus on modernizing the user interface, enhancing metadata management, and expanding support for new camera models and file formats." Some of the changes include a new survey tool, more advanced search and sorting options, as well as bulk editing of geolocation coordinates.