December GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali featuring sixteen new GNU releases: GnuPG, a2ps, and more!

• a2ps-4.15.8: GNU a2ps converts almost anything to a PostScript file, ready for printing. It accomplishes this by being able to delegate files to external handlers, such as Groff and Gzip. It handles as many steps as is necessary to produce a pretty-printed file. It also includes some extra abilities for special cases, such as pretty-printing --help output.
• gdb-17.1: GDB is the GNU debugger. With it, you can monitor what a program is doing while it runs or what it was doing just before a crash. It allows you to specify the runtime conditions, to define breakpoints, and to change how the program is running to try to fix bugs. It can be used to debug programs written in C, C++, Ada, Objective-C, Pascal, and more.
• git-merge-changelog-1.0: The GNU vc-changelog package contains tools for working with GNU-style ChangeLog files under version control. It currently contains the git-merge-changelog program, a custom git merge driver that avoids conflict markers in ChangeLog files during operations like git pull, git rebase, git am -3, and so on.
• gnuhealth-client-5.0.1: GNU Health is a free medical software system, including support for electronic medical records (EMR), a health information system (HIS) installed and managed using GNU Health Control, and hospital management information system (HMIS) with an accompanying native GTK client. It supports both Spanish and English interfaces. It has been adopted by the United Nations University for implementation and training, as well as by several hospitals and health ministries around the world.
• gnuhealth-control-5.0.2: GNU Health is a free medical software system, including support for electronic medical records (EMR), a health information system (HIS) installed and managed using GNU Health Control, and hospital management information system (HMIS) with an accompanying native GTK client. It supports both Spanish and English interfaces. It has been adopted by the United Nations University for implementation and training, as well as by several hospitals and health ministries around the world.
• gnunet-0.26.2: 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-2.5.16: 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).
• inetutils-2.7: Inetutils is a collection of common network programs, such as an ftp client and server, a telnet client and server, and an rsh client and server.
• mailutils-3.21: GNU Mailutils is a collection of programs for managing, viewing and processing electronic mail. It contains both utilities and server daemons and all operate in a protocol-agnostic way. The underlying libraries are also available, simplifying the addition of mail capabilities to new software.
• ncurses-6.6: 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-20251222: 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.
• radius-1.7: Radius is a server for remote user authentication and accounting. It is generally useful for networks that require a centralized authentication and accounting services for its workstations. Authentication can be performed in a variety of ways, such as via /etc/passwd or credentials stored in an SQL database.
• shepherd-1.0.9: 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.
• taler-1.3: Taler provides a payment system that makes privacy-friendly online transactions fast and easy.
• tramp-2.8.1: Taler provides a payment system that makes privacy-friendly online transactions fast and easy.
• wget2-2.2.1: GNU Wget is a non-interactive tool for fetching files using the HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols. It can resume interrupted downloads, use file name wild cards, supports proxies and cookies, and it can convert absolute links in downloaded documents to relative links.

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 Sean Whitton as a new comaintainer of emacs. Thanks and welcome aboard, Sean.

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.