Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 27, 2025

• Remi Collet ☛ Remi Collet: 🎲 PHP on the road to the 8.5.0 release

  Version 8.5.0 Release Candidate 1 is released. It's now enter the stabilisation phase for the developers, and the test phase for the users.

  RPMs are available in the php:remi-8.5 stream for Fedora ≥ 41 and  Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, CentOS, Alma, Rocky...) and as Software Collection in the remi-safe repository (or remi for Fedora)

• Remi Collet ☛ Remi Collet: ⚙️ PHP version 8.3.26 and 8.4.13

  RPMs of PHP version 8.4.13 are available in the remi-modular repository....

• [Old] Open Source Security (Audio Show) ☛ Open Source is one person

  So what do we mean by one person is open source. What I mean is if we look at all the projects that ecosyste.ms is tracking, how many have a single person maintaining that project? It’s about 7 million. This is also a big number. 7 million open source projects are one person. It’s actually bigger than that, because of the 11.8 million projects ecosyste.ms is tracking, we don’t know how many maintainers 4 million of the projects have. A bunch of those will be one person. Here’s what a graph of this looks like

• Julik Tarkhanov ☛ Scheduling things in user's time zone

  Doing something at a time convenient for the user is a recurring (sic!) challenge with web applications. And the more users you have across a multitude of time zones, the more pressing it becomes to do it well.

  It is actually not that hard, but it does have a few fiddly bits which can be challenging to put together. So, let’s do some time traveling.

• J Kenneth King ☛ Code Review Tips

  The whole process was time consuming and so Djikstra put the burden of proving that the change should be merged on the author. That made Djikstra’s job much easier. Instead of inspecting the code line by line he had only to review the proof: are the arguments sound and draw the right conclusions?

• Sean Conner ☛ This is my markup language. There are plenty of others, but this is mine

  As I already had twenty years of entries in HTML, one design goal was not to store the entries as MOPML, but to keep them their final HTML-rendered state. This meant that I could play around with the syntax of MOPML and not have to worry about breaking existing entries. Besides, if I had to edit a post after publication, I can edit the HTML directly; I have been doing that for years anyway. For the impementation, I chose Lua, specifically so I could use LPEG.

• [Repeat] Ted Unangst ☛ async dns

  curl experimented with using pthread_cancel to timeout async DNS requests and it blew up. What else can we do?

  Out of curiosity, I decided to review some alternatives and see how they work. My personal priorities are control over events; no background threads or signals or secret mechanisms.

• Adam Young: Tools First

  I have wasted a lot of time as a developer waiting for long running processes to complete. Whether it is a GNU/Linux Kernel compile, and Ansible Playbook tearing down and recreating a system on a remote server, or a gitlab pipeline building and testing code, the common problem is that my head is in the problem being addressed there, but I cannot do anything to verify hypotheses until the process completes. I often get distracted while waiting, and find that what could have been a 5 minute turn around has become a 2 hour turn around.

• Major Hayden ☛ Fun with docling

  My team at work does lots of work with retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, and parsing documents is really painful. It’s so painful that I recently delivered a talk on this very topic at DevConf.US 2025!

  Another one of the talks at DevConf.US this year was about docling. We’ve been using it on our team for a while and we really enjoy how it takes challenging documents in various formats and parses them into a single, common document.

  I’ll walk you through setting up docling in your project and show you some fun things you can do with it.

• Python

  • SANS ☛ New tool: convert-ts-bash-history.py

    One of the ways I have used it is by piping the output through sort, in particular | sort -t '|' -k 2 to take a bunch of bash history files and sort them in time order. I've gone back and forth on whether or not to swap the first 2 columns, but since I encounter so many more history files without timestamps than with, having the path to the particular file that contains the command first has been quite useful. I might also add a switch to leave the file path off. I welcome comments/thoughts from others out there who might use it. There is a reason that this is v0.9, not yet v1.0.

• Golang

  • Anton Zhiyanov ☛ Go is #2 among newer languages

    I checked out several programming languages rankings. If you only include newer languages (version 1.0 released after 2010), the top 6 are: ➀ TypeScript, ➁ Go, ➂ Rust, ➃ Kotlin, ➄ Dart, and ➅ Swift.

• Ruby

  • It's FOSS ☛ Are We Looking at The Corporate Takeover of Ruby's Ecosystem?

    Corporate interests might be reshaping Ruby.