GNU Spotlight December 2009

Originally published in the Free Software Foundation's Free Software Supporter - Issue 21, December 2009:
GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry

Here are the recent GNU software releases:

  • archimedes-0.9.0
  • autoconf-2.65
  • automake-1.11.1
  • cgicc-3.2.9
  • coreutils-8.1
  • denemo-0.8.10
  • dionysus-1.1.0
  • freeipmi-0.8.1
  • gama-1.9.07
  • glibc-2.11
  • glpk-4.40
  • gnun-0.4
  • gsasl-1.4.0
  • gzip-1.3.14
  • icecat-3.5.5
  • ignuit-0.0.16
  • libextractor-0.5.23
  • libgsasl-1.4.0
  • libtool-2.2.6b
  • mpfr-2.4.2
  • mtools-4.0.12
  • myserver-0.9.1
  • nano-2.2.0
  • patch-2.6
  • sipwitch-0.5.11
  • tramp-2.1.17
  • ucommon-2.0.7
  • xboard-4.4.2
  • zile-2.3.14

I'd like to specially note the first new release of patch in many years. Thanks to the new co-maintainer, Andreas Gruenbacher, for reviving this.

To get announcements of most new GNU packages, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu. Nearly all GNU software is available from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors (http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html). You can use the URL http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror; for example, http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gdb/ will redirect to the GDB directory on a mirror.

This month we welcome Spencer Buckner, author of the new GNU package gsegrafix, an advanced plot-generating program that integrates well with GNU Octave.

We also welcome Benoit Hamet as the new maintainer of GNU phpGroupWare, and Chris Simon as a new co-maintainer of GNU miscfiles, and Dhaivat Pandya and Medhamsh Vuthpala as the new co-maintainers of GNU gtypist.

Thanks also to existing maintainers taking on additional packages: Andy Wingo for volunteering to co-maintain Guile, Eric Blake for findutils, Jim Meyering for diffutils and grep, Alfred Szmidt for miscfiles, and Paolo Bonzini for grep.

Several GNU packages are looking for maintainers and other assistance. Please see http://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#unmaint if you'd like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at http://www.gnu.org/help/help.html. To submit new packages to GNU, see http://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.

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