GNU Spotlight December 2022

Seventeen new GNU releases in the last month (as of December 27, 2022):

• bash-5.2.15: 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.
• g-golf-0.8.0-a.1: G-Golf (Gnome: (Guile Object Library for)) is a library for developing modern applications in Guile Scheme. It comprises a direct binding to the GObject Introspection API and higher-level functionality for importing Gnome libraries and making GObject classes (and methods) available in Guile's object-oriented programming system, GOOPS.
• gcl-2.6.13: GCL is an implementation of the Common Lisp language. It features the ability to compile to native object code and to load native object code modules directly into its lisp core. It also features a stratified garbage collection strategy, a source-level debugger and a built-in interface to the Tk widget system.
• global-6.6.9: GNU GLOBAL is a source code tagging system that functions in the same way across a wide array of environments, such as different text editors, shells and web browsers. The resulting tags are useful for quickly moving around in a large, deeply nested project.
• gnuhealth-client-4.0.2: 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, and several hospitals and health ministries around the world.
• gnunet-0.19.0: 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.
• gnupg-2.4.0: The GNU Privacy Guard is a complete implementation of the OpenPGP standard. It is used to encrypt and sign data and communication. It features powerful key management and the ability to access public key servers. It includes several libraries: libassuan (IPC between GnuPG components), libgpg-error (centralized GnuPG error values), and libskba (working with X.509 certificates and CMS data).
• guix-1.4.0: GNU Guix is a functional package manager for the GNU system, and is also a distribution thereof. It includes a virtual machine image. Besides the usual package management features, it also supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, per-user profiles, and much more. It is based on the Nix package manager.
• help2man-1.49.3: GNU help2man is a program that converts the output of standard `--help' and `--version' command-line arguments into a manual page automatically.
• lilypond-2.24.0: GNU LilyPond is a music typesetter, which produces high-quality sheet music. Music is input in a text file containing control sequences which are interpreted by LilyPond to produce the final document. It is extendable with Guile.
• linux-libre-6.1-gnu: GNU Linux-Libre is a free (as in freedom) variant of the Linux kernel. It has been modified to remove all non-free binary blobs.
• mit-scheme-12.0.90: GNU/MIT Scheme is an implementation of the Scheme programming language. It provides an interpreter, a compiler and a debugger. It also features an integrated Emacs-like editor and a large runtime library.
• mpc-1.3.1: GNU MPC is a C library for performing arithmetic on complex numbers. It supports arbitrarily high precision and it correctly rounds the results.
• nano-7.1: 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.
• parallel-20221222: 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.
• texinfo-7.0.1: 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.
• tramp-2.5.4: TRAMP is a GNU Emacs package that allows you to access files on remote machines as though they were local files. This includes editing files, performing version control tasks and modifying directory contents with `dired'. Access is performed via ssh, rsh, rlogin, telnet or other similar methods.

For announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu.

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.

This month, we welcome Bruno Haible as the new maintainer of GNU libffcall. Bruno is a long-time GNU maintainer and developer with a long list of contributions to many GNU packages. Welcome again, Bruno, and many thanks for all of your work!

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.