today's leftovers
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Programming
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Steinar H. Gunderson: Framework debt
Today's shower thought:
Taking on a dependency is assuming some amount of technical debt. Using a framework is taking on a dependency that is very hard to get rid of.
(All the usual properties of technical debt, positive and negative, apply)
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Using Common Lisp in Emacs
Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages still in use today, but it has evolved in multiple directions over its more than 60-year history. Two of the more prominent descendants, Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp (or Elisp), are fairly closely related at some level, but there is still something of a divide between them. Some recent discussion in the emacs-devel mailing list have shown that some elements from Common Lisp are not completely welcome in Elisp—at least in the code that is maintained by the Emacs project itself.
The discussion goes back to at least mid-September when the subject of keyword arguments, which are used extensively in Common Lisp, came up in another context; at that time, Richard Stallman pointed out that, while there is some amount of Common Lisp compatibility available for Elisp, it is ""not supposed to be used a lot"". Alfred M. Szmidt concurred, noting that useful pieces of Common Lisp can be adopted, but: ""There is no need to make Emacs Lisp complicated for the sake of compatibility with Common Lisp."" Meanwhile, Emacs maintainer Eli Zaretskii quantified the situation: ""466 out of 1637 Lisp files in Emacs require cl-lib (some of them only during compilation, i.e. they use only the macros)."" The Elisp "cl-lib" library (formerly "cl", which is deprecated, as Emacs regularly tells me) provides various compatibility macros and functions for those who need or want to use them in Emacs.
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Applications
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Enrico Zini: Introducing Debusine
- Slides
- Slide sources
- Talk page (including video)
Abstract
Debusine manages scheduling and distribution of Debian-related tasks (package build, lintian analysis, autopkgtest runs, etc.) to distributed worker machines. It is being developed by Freexian with the intention of giving people access to a range of pre-configured tools and workflows running on remote hardware.
Freexian obtained STF funding for a substantial set of Debusine milestones, so development is happening on a clear schedule. We can present where we are and, we're going to be, and what we hope to bring to Debian with this work.
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LibreQoS 1.4 released
Version 1.4 of LibreQoS was released on November 17. ""Version 1.4 is a huge milestone. A whole new back-end, new GUI, 30%+ performance improvements, support for single-interface mode.""
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Linux Foundation
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Linux Foundation Projects Unite at COP28 to Showcase Open Source Action on U.N. Sustainable Development Goals [Ed: What the heck is the connection to Linux?]
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