GNU Spotlight April 2008

Originally published in the Free Software Foundation's Free Software Supporter - Issue 3, May 2008:
GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry

As mentioned last time, GNU is participating in Google's Summer of Code program. We were very appreciative of both the quality and quantity of student applications. We had to select just 10 out of the submissions, which was difficult as always, but the result covers a wide array of GNU packages. The list of accepted proposals is at http://code.google.com/soc/2008/gnu/about.html.

In addition, quite a few GNU packages participated in the GSoC as separate organizations, rather than under the generic GNU umbrella above: GCC, GIMP, GNOME, gnucap, Hurd, Gnumeric, and GNUstep. Links for those packages' GSoC pages are at the very end of http://www.gnu.org/software/soc-projects/ideas.html.

Notable GNU releases for April 2008 include tar (now with lzma support), coreutils, and the first release of GNU's C reference manual. Here's the complete list

  • aspell-0.60.6
  • autoconf-2.62
  • commoncpp2-1.6.2
  • coreutils-6.11
  • gama-1.9.05
  • gengetopt-2.22.1
  • gjdoc-0.7.9
  • global-5.7.1
  • gnu-c-manual-0.1
  • gnuit-4.9.3
  • guile-gnome-platform-2.15.98
  • libextractor-0.5.20a
  • libidn-1.8
  • libmicrohttpd-0.3.0
  • libtool-2.2.2
  • libzrtpcpp-1.1.0
  • m4-1.4.11
  • octave-3.0.1
  • sipwitch-0.1.1
  • swbis-0.951
  • tar-1.20
  • texinfo-4.12
  • ucommon-1.9.1

See the packages' announcements, web pages (http://www.gnu.org/software/PKGNAME) or the distributions themselves for details. Nearly all are available from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu, or preferably one of the mirrors: http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html.

To get announcements of most new GNU packages, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu, which is publicly archived http://lists.gnu.org/pipermail/info-gnu.

Finally, I'd like to specially welcome two new packages to GNU: zile (http://www.gnu.org/software/zile) and libmicrohttpd (http://www.gnu.org/software/libmicrohttpd), and their maintainers, Reuben Thomas and Christian Grothoff, respectively. Welcome and thanks also to other newly-appointed maintainers: Debarshi Ray (inetutils), Daniel Baumann (spell), Joel Granados (parted), Jim Meyering (idutils), and Jose Maria Gomez Vergara (ddd).

A number of GNU packages are still looking for maintainers. Since this note is already longer than usual, let me just point interested readers to http://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#unmaint.

Please feel free to write to me, karl@gnu.org, with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.