Free software activities in August 2025
Welcome to my first free software activities report, a monthly series in which I aim to summarize my activities in the free software projects and communities I participate in.
GNU & FSF
- EmacsConf: I submitted a proposal to talk about reading and writing emails in GNU Emacs with Gnus for EmacsConf 2025. This year marks the 10th anniversary of my involvement in EmacsConf, but I’ve yet to give a talk at the conference, so I thought it would be nice to try and change that. I’m happy that my proposed talk has been accepted by my fellow organizers and volunteers who review the proposals.
- GNU Spotlight: I prepared and sent the August edition of the monthly 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.
Debian
#1070268: I recently noticed that the recutils package is missing in the latest release of Debian, Trixie. Indeed, recutils’ page on the tracker shows that it was removed from testing last year due to FTBFS bug #1066370, and its maintainer requested it be adopted by someone else in this bug. This is unfortunate, because there are other pieces of software (including other GNU packages) that rely on recutils, and the GNU Project also uses recutils extensively for various record-keeping purposes.
So I reached out to the package’s former maintainer Sven Wick, who gave their kind blessing for me to adopt it. I’ve adopted recutils in Debian with an upload that also addresses the FTBFS bug.
Many thanks, Sven, for your years of work packaging and maintaining recutils in Debian!
#1066370: Fixed FTBFS bug in recutils and uploaded to unstable.
Devuan
- devuan/documentation#13: Prepared screenshots of the installation steps for use in the upcoming Excalibur release’s installation guide.
Misc
- doric-themes: I contributed a tiny patch (
cea178c) to tweak the appearance of thediaryandorg-agenda-diaryfaces to make them stand out more.