The Qt team has entered the beta phase of its work on the highly anticipated version 6.2 of the library. Users are called upon to take the Qt 6.2 Beta for a spin, and give feedback to make sure everything is as good as it can be for the targeted September release.

Qt 6.2 will restore support for a variety of modules that were skipped in the porting process from the 5.x series to v6.0, finally allowing devs who like working with multimedia, websockets, sensors and other exciting stuff to update as well. Those who already made the jump can look forward to official support for Windows on ARM64 targets, and various core, charts and QML improvements.

Update time again: GitLab fixes another critical issue

GitLab just released versions 14.0.4, 13.12.8, and 13.11.7 of its community and enterprise editions to mitigate a critical vulnerability that allowed attackers to read arbitrary files on the server. The issue, which hasn’t received a CVE ID yet, affects all versions starting with 13.11, 13.12 and 14.0, and GitLab strongly recommends upgrading as soon as possible.

Microsoft halts SQL Server on Windows Containers program

Microsoft senior program manager Amit Khandelwal announced the suspension of the SQL Server on Windows Containers beta program this week. According to Khandelwal, it comes down to ecosystem challenges and usage patterns, though Microsoft would reconsider the project should circumstances change. The corresponding repositories and images on Docker Hub will be deleted to prevent new users from downloading the project. 

Whether potential users were tempted is a question in itself, given that the project was still in beta and didn’t see an update during the last three years – which might be a red flag for some. Teams worrying about the fate of SQL Server on Linux containers can breathe easy, however – SQL Server on Linux containers continues to be supported.

Sauce Labs buys itself a monitoring tool

Continuous testing company Sauce Labs has announced the acquisition of error reporting purveyor Backtrace. The addition is meant to extend the capabilities of Sauce Labs into production environments, “enabling customers to receive quality signals throughout all stages of the software development lifecycle” as the company wrote in a statement. 

How this will impact existing Backtrace customers, many of whom can be found in the game development space, hasn’t been shared yet. Co-founder Abel Mathew just mentioned that the company’s relationship with customers “will remain unchanged” and that investment from Sauce Labs in its product and roadmap will accelerate Backtrace’s process.

Neovim 0.5 gets experimental tree-sitter support

Editor Neovim, a Vim fork aiming to improve the original through better extensibility and advanced UIs, can be downloaded in version 0.5. The update includes approximately 4000 fresh commits that fit the tool with build-in support for LSP, additional APIs for extended marks, and a range of improvements for using Lua as a configuration language. Users interested in a demonstration of the now experimentally supported tree-sitter syntax engine should check out the recording of the announcement stream.

AWS offloads 3D engine to Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation has launched a sub-organisation called the Open 3D Foundation, or O3DF for short. Founding members include companies such as Adobe, AWS, Huawei, Intel, Niantic, Red Hat and Backtrace, all of whom want to support O3DF’s goal to make an open-source, real-time 3D engine available to every industry. For now, the organisation only houses O3DE, an Apache 2.0 licensed open-source successor of Amazon Lumberyard, though more are anticipated along the line. 

O3DE is introduced as a multi-platform 3D engine for AAA games, high-quality 3D representations, and simulations. It includes an end-to-end development environment with photorealistic rendering capabilities, a 3D content editor, a character animation system, and a visual scripting environment. Before getting too excited, however, Linux aficionados should be aware that the engine requires Windows 10 to work. It will be interesting to see if the new home can at least help to turn Linux into an officially supported platform.