Free software activities in October 2025

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.