GNU Spotlight December 2023

Eleven new GNU releases in the last month (as of December 29, 2023):

• aspell-0.60.8.1: Aspell is a spell-checker which can be used either as a library or as a standalone program. Notable features of Aspell include its full support of documents written in the UTF-8 encoding and its ability to use multiple dictionaries, including personal ones.
• autoconf-2.72: Autoconf offers the developer a robust set of M4 macros which expand into shell code to test the features of Unix-like systems and to adapt automatically their software package to these systems. The resulting shell scripts are self-contained and portable, freeing the user from needing to know anything about Autoconf or M4.
• gdb-14.1: GDB is the GNU debugger. With it, you can monitor what a program is doing while it runs or what it was doing just before a crash. It allows you to specify the runtime conditions, to define breakpoints, and to change how the program is running to try to fix bugs. It can be used to debug programs written in C, C++, Ada, Objective-C, Pascal, and more.
• gnuboot-0.1-rc3: GNU Boot is a free boot firmware distribution for initializing your hardware and booting your operating system.
• grub-2.12: GRUB is a multiboot bootloader. It is used for initially loading the kernel of an operating system and then transferring control to it. The kernel then goes on to load the rest of the operating system. As a multiboot bootloader, GRUB handles the presence of multiple operating systems installed on the same computer; upon booting the computer, the user is presented with a menu to select one of the installed operating systems.
• health-4.4.0: 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, as well as by several hospitals and health ministries around the world.
• inetutils-2.5: 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.
• libextractor-1.13: GNU libextractor is a library for extracting metadata from files. It supports a very large number of file formats, including audio files, document files, and archive files. Each file format is implemented as a plugin, so new formats can be added easily. The package also contains a command-line tool to extract metadata from a file and print the results.
• mes-0.26: 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.
• parallel-20231222: 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.
• taler-0.9.3: Taler provides a payment system that makes privacy-friendly online transactions fast and easy.

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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.