GNU Spotlight October 2022

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

Twelve new GNU releases in the last month (as of October 31, 2022):

  • gettext-0.21.1: GNU Gettext is a package providing a framework for translating the textual output of programs into multiple languages. It provides translators with the means to create message catalogs, as well as an Emacs mode to work with them, and a runtime library to load translated messages from the catalogs. Nearly all GNU packages use Gettext.
  • gnuastro-0.19: The GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro) is an official GNU package consisting of various programs and library functions for the manipulation and analysis of astronomical data.
  • gnunet-0.18.0: 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.
  • inetutils-2.4: Inetutils is a collection of common network programs, such as an ftp client and server, a telnet client and server, and an rsh client and server.
  • libidn2-2.3.4: Libidn2 is a free software implementation of IDNA2008, Punycode and Unicode TR46. Its purpose is to encode and decode internationalized domain names.
  • libosip2-5.3.1: GNU oSIP is an implementation of the SIP protocol. It is used to provide multimedia and telecom software developers with an interface to initiate and control SIP sessions.
  • libunistring-1.1: GNU libunistring is a library providing functions to manipulate Unicode strings and for manipulating C strings according to the Unicode standard.
  • make-4.4: Make is a program that is used to control the production of executables or other files from their source files. The process is controlled from a Makefile, in which the developer specifies how each file is generated from its source. It has powerful dependency resolution and the ability to determine when files have to be regenerated after their sources change. GNU make offers many powerful extensions over the standard utility.
  • mes-0.24.1: GNU Mes aims to help create full source bootstrapping for GNU/Linux systems such as Guix System. It features a mutual self-hosting Scheme interpreter written in a simple C, and a Nyacc-based C compiler written in GNU Guile-compatible Scheme. The Mes C library supports bootstrapping gcc.
  • mtools-4.0.42: 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.
  • parallel-20221022: 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.
  • r-4.2.2: R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It provides a variety of statistical techniques, such as linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification and clustering. It also provides robust support for producing publication-quality data plots. A large amount of 3rd-party packages are available, greatly increasing its breadth and scope.

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 most reliably from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/. Optionally, you may find faster download speeds at a mirror geographically close to you by choosing from the list of mirrors published at https://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html, or using 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.