A release tarball (commonly compressed) is the most common way of obtaining free and open source software. A tarball is a snapshot of one particular moment in the Gnuastro development history along with all the necessary files to configure, build, and install Gnuastro easily (see Quick start). It is very straightforward and needs the least set of dependencies (see Mandatory dependencies). Gnuastro has tarballs for official stable releases and pre-releases for testing. See Version numbering for more on the two types of releases and the formats of the version numbers. The URLs for each type of release are given below.
This URL hosts the official stable releases of Gnuastro. Always use the most recent version (see Version numbering). By clicking on the “Last modified” title of the second column, the files will be sorted by their date which you can also use to find the latest version. It is recommended to use a mirror to download these tarballs, please visit http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gnuastro/ and see below.
This URL contains unofficial pre-release versions of Gnuastro. The pre-release versions of Gnuastro here are for enthusiasts to try out before an official release. If there are problems, or bugs then the testers will inform the developers to fix before the next official release. See Version numbering to understand how the version numbers here are formatted. If you want to remain even more up-to-date with the developing activities, please clone the version controlled source as described in Version controlled source.
Gnuastro’s official/stable tarball is released with two formats: Gzip (with suffix .tar.gz) and Lzip (with suffix .tar.lz). The pre-release tarballs (after version 0.3) are released only as an Lzip tarball. Gzip is a very well-known and widely used compression program created by GNU and available in most systems. However, Lzip provides a better compression ratio and more robust archival capacity. For example, Gnuastro 0.3’s tarball was 2.9MB and 4.3MB with Lzip and Gzip respectively, see the Lzip web page for more. Lzip might not be pre-installed in your operating system, if so, installing it from your operating system’s package manager or from source is very easy and fast (it is a very small program).
The GNU FTP server is mirrored (has backups) in various locations on the globe (http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html). You can use the closest mirror to your location for a more faster download. Note that only some mirrors keep track of the pre-release (alpha) tarballs. Also note that if you want to download immediately after and announcement (see Announcements), the mirrors might need some time to synchronize with the main GNU FTP server.
GNU Astronomy Utilities 0.22 manual, February 2024.