GNU Spotlight July 2023

Ten new GNU releases in the last month (as of July 27, 2023):

• dr-geo-23.06a: GNU Dr. Geo is a program for designing and manipulating interactive geometric sketches.
• gcc-10.5.0: 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.
• gcc-13.2.0: See above for description of GCC.
• gnupg-2.4.3: 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).
• groff-1.23.0: Groff is a typesetting package that reads plain text and produces formatted output based on formatting commands contained within the text. It is usually the formatter of "man" documentation pages.
• parallel-20230722: 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.
• shepherd-0.10.2: 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.
• swbis-1.13.3: Swbis is a software administration system specified by POSIX. It features network-transparent management of software packages for system administrators. For example, entire file system directories can be copied host-to-host across a network in a transparent manner. The package also features advanced tarball creation methods and integrity checking mechanisms.
• tar-1.35: Tar provides the ability to create tar archives, as well as the ability to extract, update or list files in an existing archive. It is useful for combining many files into one larger file, while maintaining directory structure and file information such as permissions and creation/modification dates. GNU tar offers many extensions over the standard utility.
• tramp-2.6.1: 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 you may use https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

This month, we welcome Adrien Bourmault and Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli as co-maintainers of the new package GNU Boot, a free boot firmware distribution for initializing your hardware and booting your operating system.

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.