Events/Education: Emacs Meetup, FOSDEM, and PGConf

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 10, 2025

• Eric MacAdie ☛ 2024-02 Austin Emacs Meetup

  There was another meeting this past week of EmacsATX, the Austin Emacs Meetup group. For this month we had no predetermined topic. However, as always, there were mentions of many modes, packages, technologies and websites, some of which I had never heard of before, and some of this may be of interest to you as well. I was only on for an hour before I had to drop off; hopefully people did not save their bon mots for the period after my departure. layover weighting recouped

• FOSDEM

  • Andreas Schneider: Local authentication hub

    by Alexander Bokovoy and Andreas Schneider

    FOSDEM 2025 is just behind us and it was a great event as always. Alexander and I had a chance to talk
    about the local authentication hub project. Our FOSDEM talk was “localkdc – a general local authentication hub”. You can watch it and come back here for more details.

    But before going into details, let us provide a bit of a background. It is 2025 now and we should go almost three decades back (ugh!).

  • Ariadne Conill ☛ C SBOMs, and how pkgconf can solve this problem

    I recently attended FOSDEM, and saw a talk in the SBOM devroom about a software engineer’s attempts to build an SBOM for a C project. There are a number of reasons why the C ecosystem is difficult to reflect in SBOMs, but the largest problem is that the C ecosystem is fractured across a handful of build systems: GNU Autotools, CMake and Meson are the primary build systems used by projects but there are hundreds of others in the long tail.

    A key thing that these build systems have in common is that they can integrate with pkg-config, which is a database that describes available build dependencies and their use. This database, naturally, is of significant relevance to SBOM generation, because it already has most of the relevant information needed to generate an SBOM.

    pkgconf has a bomtool utility which is intended to generate SBOMs using pkg-config data. But how can this be leveraged in practice?

  • Alexander Bokovoy: Local authentication hub

    FOSDEM 2025 is just behind us and it was a great event. I had a chance to talk about the local authentication hub project. The talk was well received and I got a lot of questions about the project. We ran Identity and Access Management devroom for the second time in row and it was a great success. I had two talks at the IAM devroom, both were process reports on the activity we have announced at FOSDEM 2024. Now that both recordings of the both talks published, I can share articles which go into more details.

  • FOSDEM ☛ FOSDEM 2025 - How we are defending Software Freedom against Apple at the EU's highest court

    This talk will explain why this court case is pivotal for Free Software in Europe. In case the FSFE succeeds, Free Software developers will enjoy higher degrees of software freedom in Apple devices. They will also enjoy better access and interoperability by being able to demand effective and free-of-charge interoperability between their software and Apple’s software and hardware.

  • Terence Eden ☛ Presenting ActivityBot at FOSDEM

    Because I'm an optimist, I submitted a few talks to FOSDEM in the hope one might be accepted. Because I'm lucky, I got two speaking slots. Because I'm an idiot, I decided to do both talks. On the same day. An hour apart. On opposite ends of the venue.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ PGConf.BE 2025: Call for Papers & Sponsors

    Announcing the Belgian PostgreSQL Conference

    PGConf.be 2025 is the fifth Belgian PostgreSQL conference in Haasrode, Leuven.

    The conference will take place on May 6th, 2025. Registration for the conference will be opened later.

    The Call for Papers is open until March 15th. Submit your talks by mail with the subject 'I love Elephants'.