GNU Spotlight May 2023

Nineteen new GNU releases in the last month (as of May 28, 2023):

• cpio-2.14: GNU cpio copies files into or out of cpio or tar archives. Indeed, many formats are supported, including legacy formats. The format is determined automatically by the program and is handled appropriately. Furthermore, the location of the archive is not important. It can be another file on the drive, a tape, or data on a pipe.
• ddd-3.4.0: GNU DDD, the Data Display Debugger, is a graphical front-end for command-line debuggers. Many back-end debuggers are supported, notably the GNU debugger, GDB. In addition to usual debugging features such as viewing the source files, DDD has additional graphical, interactive features to aid in debugging.
• diffutils-3.10: GNU Diffutils is a package containing tools for finding the differences between files. The `diff' command is used to show how two files differ, while `cmp' shows the offsets and line numbers where they differ. `diff3' allows you to compare three files. Finally, `sdiff' offers an interactive means to merge two files.
• gawk-5.2.2: 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.
• gcc-12.3.0: GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection. It provides compiler front-ends for several languages, including C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, Ada, and Go. It also includes runtime support libraries for these languages.
• gdb-13.2: GDB is the GNU debugger. With it, you can monitor what a program is doing while it runs or what it was doing just before a crash. It allows you to specify the runtime conditions, to define breakpoints, and to change how the program is running to try to fix bugs. It can be used to debug programs written in C, C++, Ada, Objective-C, Pascal, and more.
• global-6.6.10: 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.
• gnuastro-0.20: The GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro) is an official GNU package consisting of various programs and library functions for the manipulation and analysis of astronomical data.
• grep-3.11: 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-opengl-0.2.0: Guile-OpenGL is a library for Guile that provides bindings to the OpenGL graphics API.
• less-633: GNU less is a pager, a program that allows you to view large amounts of text in page-sized chunks. Unlike traditional pagers, it allows both backwards and forwards movement through the document. It also does not have to read the entire input file before starting, so it starts faster than most text editors.
• libmicrohttpd-0.9.77: GNU libmicrohttpd is a small, embeddable HTTP server implemented as a C library. It makes it easy to run an HTTP server as part of another application. The library is fully HTTP 1.1 compliant. It can listen on multiple ports, supports four different threading models, and supports IPv6. It also features security features such as basic and digest authentication and support for SSL3 and TLS.
• mailutils-3.16: GNU Mailutils is a collection of programs for managing, viewing and processing electronic mail. It contains both utilities and server daemons and all operate in a protocol-agnostic way. The underlying libraries are also available, simplifying the addition of mail capabilities to new software.
• nettle-3.9: GNU Nettle is a low-level cryptographic library. It is designed to fit in easily in almost any context. It can be easily included in cryptographic toolkits for object-oriented languages or in applications themselves.
• parallel-20230522: 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.
• poke-3.2: GNU poke is an interactive, extensible editor for binary data. Not limited to editing basic entities such as bits and bytes, it provides a full-fledged procedural, interactive programming language designed to describe data structures and to operate on them.
• shepherd-0.10.0: 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.
• unifont-15.0.04: GNU Unifont is a bitmap font covering essentially all of Unicode's Basic Multilingual Plane. The package also includes utilities to ease adding new glyphs to the font.
• wget-1.21.4: GNU Wget is a non-interactive tool for fetching files using the HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols. It can resume interrupted downloads, use file name wild cards, supports proxies and cookies, and it can convert absolute links in downloaded documents to relative links.

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, I'm happy to announce the launch of the GNU Spotlight archive at https://www.gnu.org/spotlight/, where you can browse through all GNU Spotlights published to date.

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.