June GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali: Seventeen new GNU releases!

Seventeen new GNU releases in the last month (as of June 30, 2024):

• apl-1.9: GNU APL is a free interpreter for the programming language APL. It is an implementation of the ISO standard 13751.
• emacs-29.4: GNU Emacs is an extensible and highly customizable text editor. It is based on an Emacs Lisp interpreter with extensions for text editing. Emacs has been extended in essentially all areas of computing, giving rise to a vast array of packages supporting, e.g., email, IRC and XMPP messaging, spreadsheets, remote server editing, and much more. Emacs includes extensive documentation on all aspects of the system, from basic editing to writing large Lisp programs. It has full Unicode support for nearly all human languages.
• findutils-4.10.0: Findutils supplies the basic file directory searching utilities of the GNU system. It consists of two primary searching utilities: find' recursively searches for files in a directory according to given criteria andlocate' lists files in a database that match a query. Two auxiliary tools are included: updatedb' updates the file name database andxargs' may be used to apply commands with arbitrarily long arguments.
• gcc-12.4.0: 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.
• gnunet-0.21.2: 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.
• guile-3.0.10: Guile is the GNU Ubiquitous Intelligent Language for Extensions, the official extension language of the GNU system. It is an implementation of the Scheme language which can be easily embedded in other applications to provide a convenient means of extending the functionality of the application without requiring the source code to be rewritten.
• libgcrypt-1.11.0: Libgcrypt is a general-purpose cryptographic library. It provides the standard cryptographic building blocks such as symmetric ciphers, hash algorithms, public key algorithms, large integer functions and random number generation.
• mes-0.26.2: GNU Mes aims to help create full source bootstrapping for GNU/Linux systems such as Guix System. It features a mutual self-hosting Scheme interpreter written in a simple C, and a Nyacc-based C compiler written in GNU Guile-compatible Scheme. The Mes C library supports bootstrapping gcc.
• mtools-4.0.44: 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.
• mygnuhealth-2.2.0: MyGNUHealth is the GNU Health Personal Health Record (PHR) application for desktop and mobile devices and integrates with the GNU Health Federation. MyGNUHealth is a privacy-oriented PHR that puts citizens and patients in control of their health and medical information, and enhances and improves the interaction between citizens and healthcare professionals with up-to-date information on demographics and medical information.
• nettle-3.10: 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.
• octave-9.2.0: 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-20240622: 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-4.2: 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.
• r-4.4.1: 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.
• shepherd-0.10.5: 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.
• tramp-2.7.1: 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 located geographically closer 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 Andrea Corallo as a new comaintainer of emacs. Thank you for all of your efforts, Andrea, and congratulations and welcome aboard!

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.