Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers and Standards-Related Picks

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 17, 2025

• [Repeat] Nolan Lawson ☛ The fate of “small” open source

  By far the most popular npm package I’ve ever written is blob-util, which is ~10 years old and still gets 5+ million weekly downloads. It’s a small collection of utilities for working with Blobs in JavaScript.

• Linuxiac ☛ Traefik Proxy 3.6 Introduces Multi-Layer Routing for Complex Traffic Flows

  Traefik, a well-known name in cloud-native open-source proxies, released version 3.6, “Ramequin,” bringing together three major additions, with the multi-layer routing support being the most significant one.

  It introduces a hierarchical router structure that allows request processing to occur in sequential steps. A parent router can authenticate a request or add headers, while child routers use the enriched data to make the final routing decision.

• Jack Baty ☛ I’m not sure I want to maintain a complex Emacs config

  I love my (sort of) home grown Emacs config, but maintaining it can be exhausting.

  Yesterday, I complained about it a little in A blog post written with NeoVim. There’s so much going on. I’ve spent years making tweaks both small and large. This should be a good thing, but I’m not feeling great about it. It feels fragile. It is fragile.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • University of Toronto ☛ People are sending HTTP requests with X-Forwarded-For across the Internet

    The HTTP X-Forwarded-For header is something that I normally expect to see only on something behind a reverse proxy, where the reverse proxy frontend is using it to tell the backend the real originating IP (which is otherwise not available when the HTTP requests are forwarded with HTTP). As a corollary of this usage, if you're operating a reverse proxy frontend you want to remove or rename any X-Forwarded-For headers that you receive from the HTTP client, because it may be trying to fool your backend about who it is. You can use another X- header name for this purpose if you want, but using X-Forwarded-For has the advantage that it's a de-facto standard and so random reverse proxy aware software is likely to have an option to look at X-Forwarded-For.

  • Mozilla/SeaMonkey

    • Barry Kauler ☛ Download latest SeaMonkey

      Now that shellCMS is able to use LibreOffice Writer to create blog posts, that is one less reason to have SeaMonkey builtin. One of two reasons; the other is want an email client app builtin.

      Currently evaluating Claws-mail, and if do decide that it will be builtin, then SeaMonkey won’t. But for those who want SeaMonkey, it needs to be easy to install. Yes, it is a PET package available via PKGget, but I can do better than that.

• Education

  • FOSDEM ☛ FOSDEM 2026 - FOSDEM 2026 Accepted Stands

    With great pleasure we can announce that the following project will have a stand at FOSDEM 2026!

• Standards/Consortia

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ AMD vs. Intel: a Unicode benchmark

    Roughly speaking, our processors come in two types, the ARM processors found in your phone and the x64 processors made by defective chip maker Intel and AMD. The best server processors used to be made by Intel. Increasingly, defective chip maker Intel is struggling to keep up. Recently, Amazon has made available the latest AMD microarchitecture (Zen 5).

  • Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Updating forgejo's robots.txt

    robots.txt is, of course, a voluntary mechanism, but including these directives is still prudent.