Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Programming

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 08, 2025

• Dan MacKinlay ☛ Synchronising files across machines

  Choose this if… your campus runs a giant free Owncloud service so you may as well use it. Owncloud and Nextcloud are two forks of the same codebase. Nextcloud seems to be hipper. They both look similar to me. Since I encountered Owncloud first I mention it here; the differences seem philosophical but not especially practical.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Chromium

    • Manuel Matuzović ☛ Close requests, close watchers, and the dialog element

      The latest version of Chrome (134) comes with a new light-dismiss behavior for the dialog element, which enables a native click-outside feature. That's fantastic! Reading the announcement, I wondered how many ways there are to close a dialog element.

      The specification states that a user can send a close request to the user agent, indicating that the user wishes to close something currently being shown on the screen, such as a popover, menu, or dialog. There are also close watchers, which listen to other close or cancel actions.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ Pigsty v3.3 Release: with 404 PostgreSQL Extensions

    Unlocking PostgreSQL’s Full Potential with the 404 available extensions!

    Pigsty v3.3.0 is now live, following the release of PostgreSQL 17.4. This update delivers a complete PostgreSQL ecosystem with over 400 extensions, focusing on making self-hosting simpler than ever. Key new extensions include pg_documentdb from MS, pg_collection from AWS, and pg_tracing from DataDog. With the integration of FerretDB 2.0 supporting MongoDB compatibility over PostgreSQL. Pigsty’s extension catalog is now an unrivaled resource for expanding PostgreSQL’s capabilities. See the full list of extensions here.

  • [Old] CedarDB ☛ Why Trees Without Branches Grow Faster: The Case for Reducing Branches in Code

    In the same way that arborists remove branches from trees to ensure healthy and desirable tree growth, it can also be beneficial to remove branches in software. We claim that pruning branches is a good thing in some of our blog posts, but we never got around to explaining why. In this post, we will rectify that and explore why, although branches are essential to software, it is a good idea to reduce them where possible to increase CPU efficiency.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice

  • Document Foundation ☛ International Woman’s Day

• Programming/Development

  • Andy Wingo: whippet lab notebook: untagged mallocs, bis

    Earlier this week I took an inventory of how Guile uses the Boehm-Demers-Weiser (BDW) garbage collector, with the goal of making sure that I had replacements for all uses lined up in Whippet. I categorized the uses into seven broad categories, and I was mostly satisfied that I have replacements for all except the last: I didn’t know what to do with untagged allocations: those that contain arbitrary data, possibly full of pointers to other objects, and which don’t have a header that we can use to inspect on their type.

    But now I do! Today’s note is about how we can support untagged allocations of a few different kinds in Whippet’s mostly-marking collector.