Amin Bandali: Free software activities in May 2026

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 ffs package 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 money error due to the anti-bot challenge being served with a HTTP 402 (Payment Required) response. So I landed a patch 12eec781ed6 to 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 patch ec3d662de0b to 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-boundaries and my convenience configuration macros.
• 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.