Status Report - Week 47 2025

Real life

This was yet another quiet week on the personal front - this is good.

I have finally finished reading The Lord of the Rings, and really liked it. I completely ignored this book's existence for decades because my contrarian self despised all the fuss people were making about the movie series 20+ (!!) years ago, and it was a mistake. Its size (1000+ pages) can be scary, but its does not "feel" long, and the story is really good. Thumbs up.

I have started Par le fer et par le feu by Alexandre Jubelin, of Le Collimateur "fame", initially as a means of supporting his work, but it turns out that the history of naval combat in the 16th and 17th century is actually super interesting. I'm learning a ton of "not super useful", and loving it!

I ran 23.6km, enjoying the colder temperatures. While I'm still pondering whether I should sign up for the Leiden Marathon this year, Lyla and I have for the 15km race at the CPC Loop Den Haag in March.

My GeoGuessr week was painful, even though I remain in the Gold I division: I lost 36 of my 63 games, and felt desperate during a few "catastrophic loss streaks". There's a saying in French that I don´t really know how to translate describing the week well: "c'est le métier qui rentre".

Open source

I continued to work mostly on SourceHut and aerc, but I am starting to feel a itch to do some GCC development again; time will tell if it's just talk or it actually happens.

On the SourceHut from, I got a cool shout-out in their Q4 What's cooking on SourceHut? post, which is very nice.

I iterated on the "submitter patch series", that give users more control on what events trigger builds. For instance, you'll be able to state that you only want builds to happen for pushes to master, and not for patchsets received on a mailing list. This and that patch are merged, and I'll send new revisions for this and that today.

I also sent a trivial compilation fix identified by sr.ht-integration-testing.

Talking about sr.ht-integration-testing, I implemented a bunch of semi-random improvements, mostly to simplify things and combat flakiness:

• Use hut instead of the UI when possible for builds.sr.ht (ticket)
• Tighter output for daily runs (ticket)
• Support using my forks instead of upstream in sr.ht-container-compose if needed (ticket)
• Use require instead of assert in tests (ticket)
• Move git related functions into a class (ticket)

Those require a small improvement to hut's hut builds list (patch). Along the way, I noticed that hut builds resubmit did not conserve build tags, just like the UI did, hence this patch.

Finally, I spent a bit of time on aerc, in particular investigating an issue recently reported on IRC, and again in the mailing list with one of the features I implemented way back. The reporter did an awesome detective work, and I was mostly the scribe in the fix.

In passing, I added an option to get go-imap to log its interations with the IMAP server (patch) and made a pretty useless error log a bit better (patch).