Hello and welcome to my May 2026 free software activities report. A lot's been going on in my life offline so I took a bit of a hiatus from doing these reports, but I've had a fairly productive month of May so I thought it'd be nice to do another one for this month.
GNU & FSF
- GNU Emacs:
- ffs-0.2.2: I finally polished and published my
ffspackage for GNU Emacs on GNU ELPA. Many thanks to Protesilaos for rounds of code review and feedback for improving and polishing the package in preparation for submission to GNU ELPA. - bug#81101: Trying to visit https://www.emacswiki.org in EWW
I noticed it fails with a
Somebody wants you to give them moneyerror due to the anti-bot challenge being served with a HTTP 402 (Payment Required) response. So I landed a patch12eec781ed6to no longer do that. Thanks to Emacs comaintainer Sean Whitton for reviewing and approving my proposed patch. - bug#81107: I noticed that in EWW, unlike
<input type="submit">HTML buttons,<button>elements were not tab-stoppable, leading to poorer usability and accessibility. So I landed a patchec3d662de0bto fix that. Thanks to Emacs comaintainer Eli Zaretskii for reviewing, providing feedback, and accepting my proposed change. - Emacs Chat with Sacha Chua: I joined Sacha for a new episode of
her Emacs Chat podcast, where we talked about Emacs and life.
I gave a quick tour of my Emacs configuration, discussing at
length my configurations for EXWM (Emacs X Window Manager) among
other topics like Emacs's facility for visually indicating buffer
boundaries in the fringe by setting
indicate-buffer-boundariesand my convenience configuration macros.
- ffs-0.2.2: I finally polished and published my
- maintainers@: I started the next long-overdue round of emails to GNU package maintainers to confirm the contact information we have on file for them and get a brief status update about their packages. Emails are sent in small batches to keep the workload of handling the responses manageable for assistant GNUisances.
- GNU Spotlight: I prepared and sent the May GNU Spotlight to the FSF campaigns team for publication on the FSF's community blog and the monthly Free Software Supporter newsletter.
Debian
I've begun the work toward updating the Jami package in Debian unstable again, which means I need to package new releases of its direct and indirect dependencies. For OpenDHT, I need to update RESTinio, and to do that I first need to package expected-lite and sobjectizer for Debian:
- #1120837: ITP: expected-lite – expected objects for C++11 and later
- #1137609: ITP: sobjectizer – C++ implementation of Actor, Publish-Subscribe, and CSP models
I've been working on packaging both and hope to have them uploaded to the archive in the next days and weeks.
That's it for this month's report.
Take care, and so long for now.