GNU Spotlight March 2023

Twelve new GNU releases in the last month (as of March 31, 2023):

• a2ps-4.15.3: GNU a2ps converts almost anything to a PostScript file, ready for printing. It accomplishes this by being able to delegate files to external handlers, such as Groff and Gzip. It handles as many steps as is necessary to produce a pretty-printed file. It also includes some extra abilities for special cases, such as pretty-printing `--help' output.
• coreutils-9.2: Coreutils includes all of the basic command-line tools that are expected in a POSIX system. These provide the basic file, shell and text manipulation functions of the GNU system. Most of these tools offer extended functionality beyond that which is outlined in the POSIX standard.
• grep-3.10: grep is a tool for finding text inside files. Text is found by matching a pattern provided by the user in one or many files. The pattern may be provided as a basic or extended regular expression, or as fixed strings. By default, the matching text is simply printed to the screen, however the output can be greatly customized to include, for example, line numbers. GNU grep offers many extensions over the standard utility, including, for example, recursive directory searching.
• guile-cv-0.4.0: Guile-CV is a Computer Vision functional programming library for the Guile Scheme language. Guile-CV is based on Vigra (Vision with Generic Algorithms). It comprises a direct binding to vigra_c (a C wrapper to a subset of the Vigra library), and a higher level API written in Guile Scheme.
• indent-2.2.13: Indent is a program that makes source code easier to read by reformatting it in a consistent style. It can change the style to one of several different styles such as GNU, BSD or K&R. It has some flexibility to deal with incomplete or malformed syntax. GNU indent offers several extensions over the standard utility.
• mcron-1.2.3: GNU Mcron is a complete replacement for Vixie cron. It is used to run tasks on a schedule, such as every hour or every Monday. Mcron is written in Guile, so its configuration can be written in Scheme; the original cron format is also supported.
• mtools-4.0.43: GNU Mtools is a set of utilities for accessing MS-DOS disks from a GNU or Unix system. It supports long file names and multiple disk formats. It also supports some FAT-specific features such as volume labels and FAT-specific file attributes.
• octave-8.1.0: 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.
• orgadoc-1.3: GNU OrgaDoc is a system for easily maintaining a pool of documents between computers. Documents are synchronized by `rsync' or `unison'; no database or HTTP server is required.
• parallel-20230322: 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.
• r-4.2.3: R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It provides a variety of statistical techniques, such as linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification and clustering. It also provides robust support for producing publication-quality data plots. A large amount of 3rd-party packages are available, greatly increasing its breadth and scope.
• texinfo-7.0.3: 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.

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 you may use https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

This month, we welcome Samuel Thibault as maintainer of GNU Hurd.

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.