GNU Spotlight March 2010

Originally published on the Free Software Foundation's community blog:
GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry (March 2010)

This month we welcome Thomas Schmitt as the maintainer of the new package xorriso, and Peter Simons as the maintainer of the new package autoconf-archive (another notable new entry!). We also welcome Aleksander Morgado and Reinhard Mueller as a new co-maintainers of GNU PDF, Albert Chu as co-maintainer of freeipmi, Vladimir Serbinenko as co-maintainer of grub, Thien-Thi Nguyen as co-maintainer of RCS, and previous maintainer Giuseppe Scrivano for also taking on gcal.

Here are the recent GNU software releases:

  • acct-6.5.4
  • archimedes-0.9.1
  • auctex-11.86
  • autogen-5.10.1
  • binutils-2.20.1
  • commoncpp2-1.8.0
  • cppi-1.14
  • denemo-0.8.14
  • dfarc-3.6
  • diffutils-2.9
  • electric-8.11
  • enscript-1.6.5.1
  • freeipmi-0.8.4
  • global-5.8.1
  • glpk-4.43
  • gnash-0.8.7
  • gnubatch-1.2
  • gnunet-0.8.1b
  • gnuspool-1.6
  • gsasl-1.4.1
  • libgsasl-1.4.1
  • libidn-1.18
  • m4-1.4.14
  • mit-scheme-9.0
  • mtools-4.0.13
  • myserver-0.9.2
  • nano-2.2.3
  • parted-2.2
  • sharutils-4.9
  • sipwitch-0.7.2
  • solfege-3.14.11
  • units-1.88
  • xorriso-0.5.0
  • zile-2.3.15

I'd like to specially note two things this month. First, the first new release of patch in many years. Thanks to the new co-maintainer, Jim Meyering, for reviving it (among all his other core work). Second, the new GNU package xorriso, a modern (and compatible) equivalent to mkisofs. Thanks to the maintainer, Thomas Schmitt, and his colleagues for doing all the work to make it possible to include this in GNU.

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.

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.