April GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali: Eleven new GNU releases!

Eleven new GNU releases in the last month (as of April 28, 2024):

• ed-1.20.2: Ed is a line-oriented text editor: rather than offering an overview of a document, ed performs editing one line at a time. It can be executed both interactively and via shell scripts. Its method of command input allows complex tasks to be performed in an automated way. GNU ed offers several extensions over the standard utility.
• g-golf-0.8.0-rc-3: 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.
• gnubg-1.08.003: The GNU backgammon application can be used for playing, analyzing and teaching the game. It has an advanced evaluation engine based on artificial neural networks suitable for both beginners and advanced players. In addition to a command-line interface, it also features an attractive, 3D representation of the playing board.
• ncurses-6.5: GNU Ncurses is a library which provides capabilities to write text to a terminal in a terminal-independent manner. It supports pads and color as well as multiple highlights and forms characters. It is typically used to implement user interfaces for command-line applications. The accompanying ncursesw library provides wide character support.
• parallel-20240422: 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-4.0: 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-4.4.0: 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-0.10.4: 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.
• stow-2.4.0: GNU Stow is a symlink manager. It generates symlinks to directories of data and makes them appear to be merged into the same directory. It is typically used for managing software packages installed from source, by letting you install them apart in distinct directories and then create symlinks to the files in a common directory such as `/usr/local'.
• taler-0.10.1: Taler provides a payment system that makes privacy-friendly online transactions fast and easy.
• tramp-2.6.3: 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.

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.