Amin Bandali: Free software activities in October 2025

October 31, 2025 | by Arround The Web | No comments

Hello and welcome to my October free software activities report.

GNU & FSF

GNU Spotlight: I prepared and sent the October GNU Spotlight
to the FSF campaigns team, who will review and publish it on the
FSF’s community blog and as part of the next issue of the monthly
Free Software Supporter newsletter.
GNU Emacs:
- bug#79629: I noticed that I was unable to customize the
  holiday-other-holidays variable using the setopt macro:
  my change did not seem to take effect. As Eli Zaretskii
  helpfully pointed out, this was because customizing
  holiday-other-holidays did not recompute the value of
  calendar-holidays, which is computed once, when the package
  is loaded.
  
  So I prepared and sent a patch 500a2d0cc55 to recompute
  calendar-holidays when its components are set.
- bbabc1db258: While reading about custom-reevaluate-setting
  in the Startup Summary node of the GNU Emacs Lisp reference manual
  I noticed a small typo, so I committed a patch to fix it.

The Free Software Foundation celebrated its fortieth birthday
on 4 October 2025 online and in person in Boston! I was not
able to attend the event in person, so I recorded a video for
the FSF40 volunteer panel held at the venue.
This month at work one of our Elasticsearch clusters experienced
partial failure, and we needed to extract document IDs from a backup
of one of the cluster’s shards. Elasticsearch uses Lucene under the
hood and each shard is a standalone Lucene index, so I used Lucene’s
Java API to write a little GetIDS class to query the index for
all of its documents, and for each document print its _id field,
decoding the binary-valued BytesRef as needed. The gotcha was
that all of the BytesRefs seemed to have a -1 byte in the
beginning, throwing off the recommended BytesRef.utf8ToString()
method, so I had to reimplement that method’s logic in my program
and have it use an adjusted offset + 1 and length - 1 instead.

That’s about it for this month’s report.

Take care, and so long for now.