April GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali: Twenty-one new GNU releases!

• bash-5.3-rc1: Bash is the shell, or command-line interpreter, of the GNU system. It is compatible with the Bourne Shell, but it also integrates useful features from the Korn Shell and the C Shell and new improvements of its own. It allows command-line editing, unlimited command history, shell functions and aliases, and job control while still allowing most sh scripts to be run without modification.
• chess-6.2.11: GNU Chess is a chess engine. It allows you to compete against the computer in a game of chess, either through the default terminal interface or via an external visual interface such as GNU XBoard.
• coreutils-9.7: GNU Coreutils includes all of the basic command-line tools that are expected in a POSIX system. These provide the basic file, shell and text manipulation functions of the GNU system. Most of these tools offer extended functionality beyond that which is outlined in the POSIX standard.
• datamash-1.9: GNU Datamash is a command-line program which performs basic numeric, textual, and statistical operations on input textual data files. GNU Datamash is designed to work within standard pipelines without needing to write additional code.
• diffutils-3.12: GNU Diffutils is a package containing tools for finding the differences between files. The diff command is used to show how two files differ, while cmp shows the offsets and line numbers where they differ. diff3 allows you to compare three files. Finally, sdiff offers an interactive means to merge two files.
• electric-9.08: GNU Electric is a CAD program for designing electrical circuits, handling custom IC layout, schematic drawing and hardware description language specifications. Several CAD operations are supported, such as rule checking and simulation. Many different types of designs can be produced and input or output in a wide variety of formats.
• gawk-5.3.2: Gawk is the GNU implementation of Awk, a specialized programming language for the easy manipulation of formatted text, such as tables of data. Gawk features many extensions beyond the traditional implementation, including network access, sorting, and large libraries.
• gcc-15.1.0: GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection. It provides compiler front-ends for several languages, including C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, Ada, and Go. It also includes runtime support libraries for these languages.
• gcl-2.7.1: GCL is an implementation of the Common Lisp language. It features the ability to compile to native object code and to load native object code modules directly into its lisp core. It also features a stratified garbage collection strategy, a source-level debugger and a built-in interface to the Tk widget system.
• gdb-16.3: 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.
• gnunet-0.24.1: 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.
• gperf-3.3: gperf is a perfect hash function generator. For a given list of strings, it produces a hash function and hash table in C or C++ code. That the hash function is perfect means that no collisions can exist and that look-ups can be made by single string comparisons.
• grep-3.12: grep is a tool for finding text inside files. Text is found by matching a pattern provided by the user in one or many files. The pattern may be provided as a basic or extended regular expression, or as fixed strings. By default, the matching text is simply printed to the screen, however the output can be greatly customized to include, for example, line numbers. GNU grep offers many extensions over the standard utility, including, for example, recursive directory searching.
• gzip-1.14: GNU Gzip provides data compression and decompression utilities; the typical extension is .gz. Unlike zip, it compresses a single file; as a result, it is often used in conjunction with tar, resulting in .tar.gz or .tgz, etc.
• libsigsegv-2.15: GNU libsigsegv is a library to handle page faults, which occur when a program tries to access an unavailable region of memory, in user mode. By catching and handling page faults, the program can implement pageable virtual memory, stack overflow handlers, and so on.
• nano-8.4: GNU nano is a small and simple text editor for use in a terminal. Besides basic editing, it supports: undo/redo, syntax highlighting, spell checking, justifying, auto-indentation, bracket matching, interactive search-and-replace (with regular expressions), and the editing of multiple files.
• parallel-20250422: 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-4.5.0: 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.
• readline-8.3-rc1: The GNU readline library allows users to edit command lines as they are typed in. It can maintain a searchable history of previously entered commands, letting you easily recall, edit and re-enter past commands. It features both Emacs-like and vi-like keybindings, making its usage comfortable for anyone.
• shepherd-1.0.4: 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.
• unifont-16.0.03: 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 http://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#unmaint if you'd like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at http://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 http://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.