There Were 19 New GNU Releases Last Month

"Nineteen new GNU releases in the last month," reads a "July GNU Spotlight" announcement from the Free Software Foundation.

Here's (edited and condensed) descriptions of some of the highlights:

• GNU Datamash (version 1.8) — a command-line program performing basic numeric, textual, and statistical operations on input textual data files (designed to work within standard pipelines).

• GNUnet (version 0.17.2) — 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."

• GnuTLS (version 3.7.7) — A secure communications library implementing the SSL, TLS and DTLS protocols, provided in the form of a C library.

• Jami (version 20220726.1515.da8d1da) — a GNU package for universal communication that respects the freedom and privacy of its users, using distributed hash tables for establishing communication. ("This avoids keeping centralized registries of users and storing personal data.")

• LibreJS (version 7.21.0) — an add-on for GNU Icecat and other Firefox-based browsers that detects non-trivial and non-free JavaScript code from being loaded without your consent when you browse the web. "JavaScript code that is free or trivial is allowed to be loaded."

• GNU Nettle (version 3.8.1) — 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.

• GNU Octave (version 7.2.0) — a high-level interpreted language specialized for numerical computations, for both linear and non-linear applications and with great support for visualizing results.

• R (version 4.2.1) — a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics, along with robust support for producing publication-quality data plots. "A large amount of 3rd-party packages are available, greatly increasing its breadth and scope."

• TRAMP (version 2.5.3) — a GNU Emacs package allowing 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."

Click here to see the other new releases and download information.

The FSF announcement adds that "A number of GNU packages, as well as the GNU operating system as a whole, are looking for maintainers and other assistance."

19 new releases?

[Kitkoan]

The GNUs to me

Re:

[Tablizer]

What about ULD releases?

Re:

[ArmoredDragon]

Their tooling is all old shit though, i.e. distributing sources on an FTP server in tgz. They should use GNUer tools.

Re:

[Catvid-22]

Git is not GNU.

Re:

[belmolis]

What is wrong with tgz over ftp? It is easy to deal with.

Nice addition to article content type

[ericshufro1]

I would like to see an article like this every week or bi-weekly.

Re:

[aRTeeNLCH]

So, once or twice a week, or once a week, once every two weeks?

Re:

[aRTeeNLCH]

"Yes"

huh?

[nomadic]

What's GNU? It's UNIX, right?

Re:

[mcswell]

GU?

data mash?

[serviscope_minor]

I have a few awk scripts collected over the years, sounds like data mash is what I want! Definitely going to check some of these out.

Re:

[flux]

Yeah, this is the one highlight for me as well. The number of s += $5 awk scripts I've written during the years..

I gave it a shot and it's a bit more strict about the input. Missing fields are tolerated by the awk solution, not so by datamash.

Re:

[dskoll]

Ditto... Datamash looks cool. I'd never heard of it before.

Re:

[belmolis]

I have several tens of thousands of lines of AWK, from little scripts to large projects. I am curious what the motivation for Data Mash is since it seems like it duplicates AWK. (Not saying it isn't useful - I'm must wondering. I will check it out.)

Who GNU?

[Joviex]

With so many choices, you'd think the standard XKCD comes into effect. https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]

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[VjLinuxDude]

When corps started using GNU stuff without acknowledgement for commercial use, I think GPL3 was devised. Political or not, I don't care, but it goes against the philosophy or the reason FSF was founded and they have every right to defend/protect it from being misused. Without the well devised licensing system, it would have been very hard to protect contributors against the predatory lawsuits.

What? No Emacs?

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

RMS is slippin... :)

FSF lives up to its raison d'être!

[VjLinuxDude]

This is indeed a great news! Read something worthwhile on Slashdot after a while!
Finally a set of technologies that will truly liberate the internet from the grips of silicon valley, government and corporations.
If you look at the kind of technologies in this release, it really feels like the work of the community done in a true spirit of science - solving real problems in the most scientific way, backed by decades of research, openness, simplicity and something you can actually understand and reason about and feel reassured using it.

Thank you FSF for these releases and all those good souls who keep working on real problems that affect people at large!

Re: FSF lives up to its raison d'être!

[Plugh]

This. I donated to FSF because they had a cool tshirt. But stuff like Jami makes it worthwhile

I'm almost afraid to ask....

[ufgrat]

... what's the status on GNU Hurd?

Hey, I know... They could rewrite systemd as GNU Hurd!

Parallel

[Dadoo]

If you read the article, you'll see one of the packages listed is Parallel. For a while, I wasn't sure it was really being maintained, and I'm glad it is. I used it to write a parallel tar script that allows me to back up almost 4TB from our main data server (a fairly beefy Proliant) in less than an hour, over two bonded 1GB Ethernet ports.

Beats the crap out of Networker/Data Domain, which we're using for everything else.

Why dear god, oh why

[groobly]

Why why why do programs need to have names that are completely opaque as to what the program actually does? This developer vanity works against adoption.

Re:

[belmolis]

The one I find most problematic is R, but for a different reason, namely that such single letter names are extremely difficult to search for.

Old news as usual?

[chrysrobyn]

Only thing I care about is R, so I went to look there. R 4.2.1 was released 2022-06-23, according to the link, which wasn't "last month" or "in the last month" for a while now. I guess /. is sticking with its "old news is good news" mantra.