October GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali: Seven new GNU releases!

• autoconf-archive-2024.10.16: Autoconf Archive is a collection of over 450 new macros for Autoconf, greatly expanding the domain of its functionality. These macros have been contributed as free software by the community.
• g-golf-0.8.0-rc8: 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.
• gnunet-0.22.2: 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.
• less-668: 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-1.3: GNU libunistring is a library providing functions to manipulate Unicode strings and for manipulating C strings according to the Unicode standard.
• parallel-20241022: 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-4.4.2: 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.

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.

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