On an average day, I make use of a few dozen or more Open Source projects, and contribute to one or two (notably Calamares and KDE, but it varies wildly). When I wear my FreeBSD packaging hat, I tend to drive-by contribute to many more projects because there’s compatibility or C++-style fixes to apply. And I try to keep up with releases, some of which I’ll highlight here.

  • praat is a phonetics application (for students of phonetics, for doing audio analysis and speech production) which had four releases in the past month. I update this when I can: the code is relatively clean and updates are simple, but it doesn’t have a high impact on my regular work and to be honest I don’t know if there are users.
  • cutelyst is a Qt web-thingy, which helps you write web applications in C++ – or something like that. Daniel writes sympathetic release notes, and the code is C++ and Qt and close to KDE and easy to update.
  • asql comes from the same place as cutelyst, and looks like “what if you could hook up an SQL query to a C++ lambda”. The answer is remarkably readable code, if you’re into that kind of thing. This is newly packaged for FreeBSD (with a PostgreSQL backend).

Something not my doing, but worth pointing out, is that Konversation 1.7.7 was released monday and the packaging updated on FreeBSD immediately. Kudos to Tobias for keeping on top of things, and the Konversation team for carrying the IRC torch.