GNU Spotlight November 2022

Fifteen new GNU releases in the last month (as of November 28, 2022):

• bash-5.2.9: Bash is the shell, or command-line interpreter, of the GNU system. It is compatible with the Bourne Shell, but it also integrates useful features from the Korn Shell and the C Shell and new improvements of its own. It allows command-line editing, unlimited command history, shell functions and aliases, and job control while still allowing most sh scripts to be run without modification.
• gawk-5.2.1: Gawk is the GNU implementation of Awk, a specialized programming language for the easy manipulation of formatted text, such as tables of data. Gawk features many extensions beyond the traditional implementation, including network access, sorting, and large libraries.
• gnubg-1.07.001: The GNU backgammon application can be used for playing, analyzing and teaching the game. It has an advanced evaluation engine based on artificial neural networks suitable for both beginners and advanced players. In addition to a command-line interface, it also features an attractive, 3D representation of the playing board.
• gnun-1.3: GNUnited Nations is a build system for translating the web site at www.gnu.org. It works via template files, which allow changes to be merged into individual translations of a page, from which the final HTML is generated. In effect, this helps to keep all translations of a page up-to-date.
• gnunet-0.18.1: GNUnet is a framework for secure peer-to-peer networking. The high-level goal is to provide a strong foundation of free software for a global, distributed network that provides security and privacy. GNUnet in that sense aims to replace the current internet protocol stack. Along with an application for secure publication of files, it has grown to include all kinds of basic applications for the foundation of a GNU internet.
• gwl-0.5.1: GWL is a workflow language that extends Guix's declarative language for package management to automate execution of programs. Additionally, GWL can use Grid Engine to offload program execution.
• lightning-2.2.0: GNU Lightning is a library that generates assembly language code at run-time. Thus, it is useful in creating Just-In-Time compilers. It abstracts over the target CPU by exposing a standardized RISC instruction set to the clients.
• mpfr-4.1.1: GNU MPFR is a C library for performing multiple-precision, floating-point computations with correct rounding.
• nano-7.0: GNU nano is a small and simple text editor for use in a terminal. Besides basic editing, it supports: undo/redo, syntax highlighting, spell checking, justifying, auto-indentation, bracket matching, interactive search-and-replace (with regular expressions), and the editing of multiple files.
• octave-7.3.0: GNU Octave is a high-level interpreted language that is specialized for numerical computations. It can be used for both linear and non-linear applications and it provides great support for visualizing results. Work may be performed both at the interactive command-line as well as via script files.
• parallel-20221122: 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.
• sed-4.9: Sed is a non-interactive, text stream editor. It receives a text input from a file or from standard input and it then applies a series of text editing commands to the stream and prints its output to standard output. It is often used for substituting text patterns in a stream. The GNU implementation offers several extensions over the standard utility.
• shepherd-0.9.3: The GNU Shepherd is a daemon-managing daemon, meaning that it supervises the execution of system services, replacing similar functionality found in typical init systems. It provides dependency-handling through a convenient interface and is based on GNU Guile.
• taler-0.9.0: Taler provides a payment system that makes privacy-friendly online transactions fast and easy.
• texinfo-7.0: Texinfo is the official documentation format of the GNU project. It uses a single source file using explicit commands to produce a final document in any of several supported output formats, such as HTML or PDF. This package includes both the tools necessary to produce Info documents from their source and the command-line Info reader. The emphasis of the language is on expressing the content semantically, avoiding physical markup commands.

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To download: nearly all GNU software is available most reliably from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/. Optionally, you may find faster download speeds at a mirror geographically close to you by choosing from the list of mirrors published at https://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html, or using https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

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.