October GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali featuring nine new GNU releases: GNUnet, Marst, and more!

• gnunet-0.25.2: 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.
  
• gnupg-2.5.13: 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).
  
• less-685: 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.
  
• libunistring-1.4.1: GNU libunistring is a library providing functions to manipulate Unicode strings and for manipulating C strings according to the Unicode standard.
  
• marst-2.8: GNU MARST is an Algol-to-C translator. The package consists of the translator itself, a library that contains the necessary Algol 60 procedures, and a converter that converts existing Algol 60 programs from other representations to the MARST representation.
  
• parallel-20251022: 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.
  
• r-4.5.2: 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-1.0.8: 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-17.0.02: 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.

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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.