Reproducible Builds, Software Freedom, and More Free Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 05, 2025

• Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in November 2025

  Welcome to the report for November 2025 from the Reproducible Builds project!

• Jamie Zawinski ☛ XScreenSaver and PAM

  I could not even hazard a guess as to which of these things are still true, or how many decades ago they stopped being true, or which of them are influenced by Linux versus BSD versus Solaris versus HPUX versus AIX versus Kerberos or other things that nobody cares about any more.

  So I am considering making the following changes: [...]

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • David Bushell ☛ Deleting Code for Performance

    My website is built with a home-cooked static site generator (don’t look, it’s a mess). I wrote a half-baked markdown parser I haven’t touched in a year. Until now!

    It’s time to under-engineer Hmmarkdown!

• Education

  • DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ NYCBUG: Holiday Party & Lightning Talks & Tips tonight – DragonFly BSD Digest

    Note that the recorded stream from the last event, The Once and Future COBOL, is available on YouTube and PeerTube. I heard the speaker, James K. Lowden, talk about FreeTDS years ago and enjoyed it too.

  • Robert Haas ☛ Robert Haas: The Future of the PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop

    The PostgreSQL Hacking Workshop will be taking a well-earned Christmas break in December of 2025. The future of the workshop is a little bit unclear, because I'm continuing to have a bit of trouble finding enough good talks online to justify doing one per month: the best source of talks for the event is pgconf.dev, but not all of those talks are about hacking on PostgreSQL, and not all of those that are about hacking are equally interesting to potential attendees. Also, we've already eaten through much of the backlog of older hacking-related talks that are posted online. Many conferences have few hacking-related talks, or just don't post any videos (which are expensive and time-consuming to produce).

• FSF / Software Freedom

  • Kevin Boone ☛ Kevin Boone: ‘Sideloading’ restrictions on Android: how big a deal will they be?

    Let’s start by defining out terms. ‘Sideloading’ is a word used in the smartphone world for what would simply be called ‘installing software’ anywhere else. The term ‘sideloading’ has a pejorative ring to it, as if people who indulge in it are doing something sketchy. We don’t ‘sideload’ software on Windows, or Linux, or anything else – we merely ‘install’ it. In the smartphone world, though, ‘sideloading’ software has come mean obtaining it from some source not officially sanctioned by the vendor.

  • Divya ☛ Local-first is not offline-first

    The distinction between local-first and offline-first matters because it shifts the center of gravity in software architecture away from the cloud to the user’s local device. While the offline-first movement responded to latency and network constraints, the local-first movement is a reaction to cloud dependency. Local-first carries a philosophical implication and forces us to contend with the question of data sovereignty and user autonomy.