GNU Spotlight June 2022

Originally published on the Free Software Foundation's community blog:
June GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali: Twelve new GNU releases!

Twelve new GNU releases in the last month (as of June 28, 2022):

  • freetalk-4.2: GNU Freetalk is a command-line Jabber/XMPP chat client. It notably uses the Readline library to handle input, so it features convenient navigation of text as well as tab-completion of buddy names, commands and English words. It is also scriptable and extensible via Guile.
  • gcc-10.4.0: GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection. It provides compiler front-ends for several languages, including C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, Ada, and Go. It also includes runtime support libraries for these languages.
  • gnuhealth-4.0.4: GNU Health is a free medical software system, including support for electronic medical records (EMR), a hospital information system (HIS), and health information system. It supports both Spanish and English interfaces. It has been adopted by the United Nations University for implementation and training, and several hospitals and health ministries around the world.
  • gnunet-0.17.1: GNUnet is a framework for secure peer-to-peer networking. The high-level goal is to provide a strong foundation of free software for a global, distributed network that provides security and privacy. GNUnet in that sense aims to replace the current internet protocol stack. Along with an application for secure publication of files, it has grown to include all kinds of basic applications for the foundation of a GNU internet.
  • gsasl-2.0.0: GNU SASL is an implementation of the Simple Authentication and Security Layer framework. On network servers such as IMAP or SMTP servers, SASL is used to handle client/server authentication. This package contains both a library and a command-line tool to access the library.
  • hello-2.12.1: GNU Hello prints the message "Hello, world!" and then exits. It serves as an example of standard GNU coding practices. As such, it supports command-line arguments, multiple languages, and so on.
  • libidn-1.41: libidn is a library implementing of the Stringprep, Punycode and IDNA specifications. These are used to encode and decode internationalized domain names. It includes native C, C# and Java libraries.
  • mtools-4.0.40: GNU Mtools is a set of utilities for accessing MS-DOS disks from a GNU or Unix system. It supports long file names and multiple disk formats. It also supports some FAT-specific features such as volume labels and FAT-specific file attributes.
  • nettle-3.8: GNU Nettle is a low-level cryptographic library. It is designed to fit in easily in almost any context. It can be easily included in cryptographic toolkits for object-oriented languages or in applications themselves.
  • parallel-20220622: GNU Parallel is a tool for executing shell jobs in parallel using one or more computers. Jobs can consist of single commands or of scripts and they are executed on lists of files, hosts, users or other items.
  • pspp-1.6.1: GNU PSPP is a statistical analysis program. It can perform descriptive statistics, T-tests, linear regression and non-parametric tests. It features both a graphical interface as well as command-line input. PSPP is designed to interoperate with Gnumeric, LibreOffice and OpenOffice. Data can be imported from spreadsheets, text files and database sources and it can be output in text, PostScript, PDF or HTML.
  • unifont-14.0.04: GNU Unifont is a bitmap font covering essentially all of Unicode's Basic Multilingual Plane. The package also includes utilities to ease adding new glyphs to the font.

For announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu.

To download: nearly all GNU software is available from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors from https://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html. You can use the URL https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

A number of GNU packages, as well as the GNU operating system as a whole, are looking for maintainers and other assistance: please see https://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#unmaint if you'd like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at https://www.gnu.org/help/help.html.

If you have a working or partly working program that you'd like to offer to the GNU project as a GNU package, see https://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.

As always, please feel free to write to me, bandali@gnu.org, with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.