• 2 Posts
  • 34 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2023
  • TheFool@infosec.pubtoEurope@feddit.org•Poland Leverages China’s Rail Link in Europe to Rein In BelarusEnglish
    6·
    29 days ago

    Poland Leverages China’s Rail Link in Europe to Rein In Belarus

    • Warsaw has struggled with migration crisis on Belarus border
    • Poland uses key railway route into the EU to pressure China

    By Natalia Ojewska, Aliaksandr Kudrytski, and Colum Murphy

    July 24, 2024 at 5:02 AM UTC

    Poland has threatened to choke off a key Chinese rail export route to the European Union in a diplomatic gambit to slow escalating the migration crisis on its eastern border.

    President Andrzej Duda used his state visit in Beijing in late June to link the issue of migration and freight transit on the Belarusian border, according to people briefed on the talks. The number of irregular crossings from Belarus into Poland has dropped significantly since.

    Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian leader of Belarus, has spent the last three years trying to stir up a migration emergency on his country’s 400 kilometer (250 mile) frontier with Poland. Tensions escalated in May when a Polish border guard was attacked and killed by a migrant, after which the government in Warsaw pledged to spend around $2.5 billion to fortify the area.

    It also found a diplomatic pressure point. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shuttered trade routes, Belarus has emerged as the sole railway link for Chinese goods heading to the EU with the volume of containers increasing by 89% in the first quarter of 2024, according to the Eurasian Rail Alliance.

    Limited Border Traffic May Hinder EU Imports From China

    Poland keeps only three checkpoints with Belarus open

    Lukashenko welcomed the jump in Chinese rail transit, eager to offset Belarus’ near-total dependence on Russia for cheap energy and loans.

    On July 2, after Duda had returned from Beijing, Poland signaled that it would effectively shut rail transit through the Malaszewicze checkpoint on the Belarus border for 33 hours by slowing security and customs checks.

    Poland’s leveraging of freight transit in discussions with China “could be a factor” in the lower numbers of border crossings since Duda’s visit, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told Bloomberg. “We are still very angry about the killing of our soldier on the border,” he said.

    Leveraging China

    Attempts to breach Poland’s border have ebbed and flowed in recent years, but began to rise sharply in the weeks before European parliamentary elections in June. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the migrants were predominantly from Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria and Iran and accused Belarus and Russia of weaponizing migration.

    The Polish president’s trip to China caught Lukashenko’s attention. In a speech on July 2, the Belarusian leader said that Duda “asked Xi Jinping to influence Lukashenko and Putin so that they would end migration.”

    The Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a reply to July 11 questions from Bloomberg News that Beijing “hopes that relevant parties can properly resolve differences through dialog” and “ensure the security and smoothness of international logistics channels.”

    Irregular border crossings from Belarus have plummeted by 70% since early June, Interior Minister Tomasz Siemoniak told public broadcaster TVP Info on Tuesday. More than one hundred such cases were reported by the Polish border guards on June 27, the last day of Duda’s state visit.

    Even if a tiny part of China’s exports to the EU go via Belarus, the shipping crisis on the Red Sea and its consequences for maritime trade mean that Eurasian rail links are enjoying a renaissance, said Konrad Poplawski from the Centre for Eastern Studies, a Warsaw-based think-tank.

    Warsaw’s so-far successful leverage of a strategic vulnerability against China can serve as a lesson for policymakers. Beijing, which Poplawski said is the EU’s “trade partner but also a competitor and systemic rival,” can change tack if the bloc is “ready to bear economic costs” when its core interests are at stake.

    — With assistance from Maxim Edwards and Slav Okov

  • TheFool@infosec.pubtoLinux@lemmy.ml•GNOME maintainers: here’s how to keep your issue tracker in good shape – Form and Function
    41·
    3 months ago

    One of the goals of the new GNOME project handbook is to provide effective guidelines for contributors. Most of the guidelines are based on recommendations that GNOME already had, which were then improved and updated. These improvements were based on input from others in the project, as well as by drawing on recommendations from elsewhere.

    The best example of this effort was around issue management. Before the handbook, GNOME’s issue management guidelines were seriously out of date, and were incomplete in a number of areas. Now we have shiny new issue management guidelines which are full of good advice and wisdom!

    The state of our issue trackers matters. An issue tracker with thousands of open issues is intimidating to a new contributor. Likewise, lots of issues without a clear status or resolution makes it difficult for potential contributors to know what to do. My hope is that, with effective issue management guidelines, GNOME can improve the overall state of its issue trackers.

    So what magic sauce does the handbook recommend to turn an out of control and burdensome issue tracker into a source of calm and delight, I hear you ask? The formula is fairly simple:

    • Review all incoming issues, and regularly conduct reviews of old issues, in order to weed out reports which are ambiguous, obsolete, duplicates, and so on
    • Close issues which haven’t seen activity in over a year
    • Apply the “needs design” and “needs info” labels as needed
    • Close issues that have been labelled “need info” for 6 weeks
    • Issues labelled “needs design” get closed after 1 year of inactivity, like any other
    • Recruit contributors to help with issue management

    To some readers this is probably controversial advice, and likely conflicts with their existing practice. However, there’s nothing new about these issue management procedures. The current incarnation has been in place since 2009, and some aspects of them are even older. Also, personally speaking, I’m of the view that effective issue management requires taking a strong line (being strong doesn’t mean being impolite, I should add – quite the opposite). From a project perspective, it is more important to keep the issue tracker focused than it is to maintain a database of every single tiny flaw in its software.

    The guidelines definitely need some more work. There will undoubtedly be some cases where an issue needs to be kept open despite it being untouched for a year, for example, and we should figure out how to reflect that in the guidelines. I also feel that the existing guidelines could be simplified, to make them easier to read and consume.

    I’d be really interested to hear what changes people think are necessary. It is important for the guidelines to be something that maintainers feel that they can realistically implement. The guidelines are not set in stone.

    That said, it would also be awesome if more maintainers were to put the current issue management guidelines into practice in their modules. I do think that they represent a good way to get control of an issue tracker, and this could be a really powerful way for us to make GNOME more approachable to new contributors.

  • TheFool@infosec.pubtoLinux@lemmy.ml•openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the weeks 2024/19 & 20 – Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*)
    2·
    3 months ago

    Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

    Last week, there was a public holiday on Thursday in some parts of the world (Ascension Day). Unsurprisingly, many devs, including myself and Ana, took Friday off to enjoy a longer weekend (and I can tell you: the weather was fantastic). As a result, I have to span two weeks of changes to Tumbleweed here once again. We have published 12 snapshots since my last review (0502…0515, snapshots 0504 and 0513 were not built due to weekends)

    The most relevant changes delivered as part of those snapshots were:

    • Mozilla Firefox 125.0.3
    • LibreOffice 24.2.3.2
    • GNOME 46.1
    • GIMP 2.10.38
    • LLVM 18.1.5
    • GCC 14.1
    • KDE Frameworks 6.2.0
    • PHP 8.3.7
    • PostgreSQL 16.3
    • Systemd 255.5 & 255.6
    • Linux kernel 6.8.9 (with linux-glibc-devel already prepared at 6.9)
    • Ruby 3.3.1
    • QEmu 8.2.3
    • util-linux 2.40.1

    Snapshot 0515 contained an openssh update, that mistakenly recommended installation of the subpackage openssh-server-config-rootlogin; this package has existed since the default configuration of openSSH was changed to not permit root login anymore, so admins could easily switch it back on. Due to an error, this had been triggered for automatic installation. This has since been corrected and a version of openssh-server was published to the update channel, which is NOT recommended. Please check your installation and remove the package again, should it be installed and you don’t need it (we can’t auto-remove it without breaking users that explicitly wanted it)

    The following things are known to be worked on at the moment and are reaching you in some upcoming snapshot: