GNU Status Reports: October 2011

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GNU Status Reports: October 2011
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GNU Status Reports: October 2011

Table of Contents
GNU Status Reports: October 2011 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Health (http://www.gnu.org/software/health) . . . . 1
Cflow (http://www.gnu.org/software/cflow) . . . . . . . 2
Chess (http://www.gnu.org/software/chess). . . . . . . 2
Coreutils (http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils)................................................. 2
Directory (http://www.gnu.org/software/directory)................................................. 3
Emacs (http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs) . . . . . . 3
Fontutils (http://www.gnu.org/software/fontutils)................................................. 3
Gama (http://www.gnu.org/software/gama). . . . . . . . 4
Gawk (http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk) . . . . . . . . 4
GDBM (http://www.gnu.org/software/gdbm) . . . . . . 4
GnuPG (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnupg) . . . . 5
GNURadio(http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio) . . . . . 5
GSEGrafix(http://www.gnu.org/software/gsegrafix) . . . . 6
Gtypist (http://www.gnu.org/software/gtypist) . . 7
Mailutils (http://www.gnu.org/software/mailutils)................................................. 7iGNU Status Reports: October 2011

Maverik (http://www.gnu.org/software/maverik)................................................. 7
RCS (http://www.gnu.org/software/rcs) . . . . . . . . . . 7
Sqltutor (http://www.gnu.org/software/sqltutor)................................................. 8
Tar (http://www.gnu.org/software/tar) . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Wdiff (http://www.gnu.org/software/wdiff) . . . . . . . 9
Xboard (http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard) . . . 9
Xnee (http://www.gnu.org/software/xnee) . . . . . . . . 9
Xorriso (http://www.gnu.org/software/xorriso). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

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GNU Status Reports: October 20111

GNU Status Reports: October 2011
This document collects status reports for GNU packages.
This is a revival of the GNU Status Reports from the historical GNU’s Bulletins, http://
www.gnu.org/bulletins. The goal is to provide GNU-wide news and information fromtime to time, from as many packages as possible.
This report includes items for only a few of the hundreds of GNU packages; we hopemore will be represented in future installments. http://www.gnu.org/manual lists all GNU
packages, with links to online manuals and home pages. All GNU packages can be accessedon the web via http://www.gnu.org/software/pkgname, as shown in the headings here.
For information on downloading releases, see http://www.gnu.org/software.
See also http://planet.gnu.org, which aggregates the individual GNU news items
posted on Savannah (http://savannah.gnu.org).
See also the info-gnu@gnu.org mailing list, where announcements of new GNU releases
are posted. Subscribe or view the archives at http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/
info-gnu.
The aim of the present report is to be somewhat higher-level and more general than theothers, although there is inevitably some overlap.
Questions, comments, and suggestions about this document in general are welcome;please email maintainers@gnu.org. Bug reports and suggestions for specific packages
should of course be addressed via their usual routes.
Finally, let’s mention the FSCONS 2011 conference, taking place in Gothenburg, Sweden,
November 11–13: http://fscons.org.

Health (http://www.gnu.org/software/health)(Put first instead of in alphabetical order since it is a new and especially significant addition
to GNU.)
From Luis Falcón: GNU Health is a free health and hospital information system withsupport for electronic medical records, hospital information systems, and health information
systems. Its goal is to contribute to the work of health professionals around the world toimprove the lives of the underprivileged, providing a free system that optimizes healthpromotion and disease prevention.
The GNU Health Project has been chosen by the United Nations University, Instituteof Global Health (UNU-IIGH). This organization supports the use of free (as in freedom)
software health care information system in developing countries, through capacity-building
programs and technical consultancy to improve efficiency and quality of health care services.
This is an example of how free software can leverage resources to help developing countries. Many thanks to Dr. Nurhizam Safie Mohd Satar who is leading the GNU Health integration project UNU-IIGH. This effort will increase the amount of physicians and healthcenters using free software, and we will all benefit with their valuable feedback.
Assistance of all sorts is greatly appreciated; please see our web pages for details.

GNU Status Reports: October 20112

Cflow (http://www.gnu.org/software/cflow)
From Sergey Poznyakoff: GNU cflow is a program to analyze C sources and produce both
direct and inverted flow graphs, optionally with cross-references. Version 1.4 is the latest
release. This is a stable version that contains a largely improved parser. In particular,
detection of recursive calls is sped up considerably. This release also allows a fine-grained
control over symbol types and contains several bug fixes.

Chess (http://www.gnu.org/software/chess)
From Stuart Cracraft and Antonio Ceballos: GNU Chess plays the computer’s side of agame of chess against a human, serving as a sparring partner to help improve human playlevels, improve human ratings in competitive tournament play, prepare for a match, or justplay chess while waiting for a game with a person.
Since full source code to GNU Chess is included, you can enhance the GNU Chess’s
playing and learn more about what goes on inside a computer chess program and use it foryour personal computer chess research.
In April 2011, version 6 of GNU Chess was released. Version 6 is based on Fabien
Letouzey’s Fruit 2.1 chess engine, a well-debugged program which has a strong searcher.
Standard external interfaces remain unchanged in 6.x for compatibility with 5.x (which
is now deprecated).
In addition to the Chess Engine Communication Protocol, version 6 also supports the
Universal Chess Interface (UCI). This increases, dramatically, the number of graphical userinterface front-ends GNU Chess can use.
The program can occasionally be found playing games with anyone who challenges it at
the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) under the nickname GNUChessSix.
On modern, affordable hardware, GNU Chess scores highly in standard chess rating tests(2500 ELO). It is a strong tactician, which can translate to good positional play on fastenough hardware due to increasing depth of search.
If you improve GNU Chess or use it for research, please contact the Free Software
Foundation to ensure that your improvements are considered for integration into the mainline.
Meanwhile, enjoy a game of chess and computer chess programming.

Coreutils (http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils)
From Pádraig Brady: Coreutils 8.13 was released in September. A brief summary of additions:• split --filter to compress output etc.
• md5sum --strict to exit with error on any checksum mismatch.
• join --check now reports which line the disorder was on.
• rm uses less memory for large directories.
• shuf uses less memory when outputting a small subset.
• date now parses iso-8601 ’T’ separated dates.
• timeout --foreground to support interactive commands, and timeout now supports
subsecond timeouts.

GNU Status Reports: October 20113

Directory (http://www.gnu.org/software/directory)
Although not the usual sort of GNU package, it’s worth mentioning here that the Free
Software Directory has been relaunched as a collaborative wiki-based project. A generalannounce is at http: / / www . fsf . org / news / directory-relaunch, and more detailed
information at http://www.fsf.org/blogs/directory/behind-the-scenes.
Volunteers to update the existing entries and add more programs are greatly needed.
Please see http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/FSD:Participate.

Emacs (http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs)
From Stefan Monnier: GNU Emacs has entered the pretest phase for its 24.1 release, which
is aimed for the first half of 2012. The features in this release will include:• packaging system that allows users to easily download extensions for Emacs (the default
package archive is hosted by GNU, and maintained by the Emacs developers)—wewelcome submissions of new packages;• support for displaying and editing bidirectional text, including right-to-left scripts suchas Arabic and Hebrew;• native support for lexical scoping in Emacs Lisp;• improved support for Custom themes;• native support for TLS/SSL encryption;• improved integration with the Gnome desktop;• and upgrades to many other included modes and packages.

Fontutils (http://www.gnu.org/software/fontutils)
From Adam Dutko: I’ve been working through getting the code in CVS to build and amvery close. I’ve also been investigating a migration to Automake and have made some
progress in a different (uncommitted) branch. I’m hoping to have the first release building
before the end of October.

GNU Status Reports: October 20114

Gama (http://www.gnu.org/software/gama)
From Vaclav Petras: GNU Gama is a project dedicated to adjustment of geodetic networks;
the latest release is 1.11 (http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gama) and the development code isavailable from Savannah (http://savannah.gnu.org/p/gama).
The latest version contains several documentation and source code improvements as wellas improved UTF-8 support.
The program gama-local provides adjustment in a local coordinate system. Input data
are stored in an XML file or an SQLite database. Adjustment results are represented asformatted plain text or an XML file.
The program gama-g3 partially supports adjustment in a global coordinate system (adjustment model on ellipsoid). Input and output data are in an XML file.
User visible strings and generated reports have English, French, Spanish, Finnish, Dutch,
Catalan, Russian, Ukrainian, Hungarian and Czech translation.
We are planing several new features and improvements:• wider use of SQLite database as native format• support reading data recorded by some total stations• graphical user interface• better C++ API
You can ask for help or discuss new features on the info-gama mailing list, and bug
reports should go to the bug-gama list.

Gawk (http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk)
From Arnold Robbins: Gawk 4.0.0 was released at the end of June, 2011. There are many
new features, including a gawk debugger. I hope to do the first patch release before theend of the year and then development of more new stuff towards gawk 4.1 should pick up
speed.

GDBM (http://www.gnu.org/software/gdbm)
From Sergey Poznyakoff: After a long period of development, a new version of GDBM, 1.9.1,
was released this year. It contains significant improvements over its predecessor. The mostimportant user-visible changes are the use of memory mapping to speed up I/O operations
and improvements in ndbm compatibility code. In particular, the latter fixes a long-standing
bug which prevented GDBM from being used with some MTAs, most notably Sendmail andPostfix. Another series of changes addressed compatibility with the POSIX specification.
This version introduces a number of improvements to the GDBM interface. Changes
to gdbm_setopt interface are particularly noteworthy as they allow the programmer tofine-tune the database and retrieve various database parameters.
GDBM 1.9.1 includes an interactive tool for manipulating GDBM database files: thetestgdbm program allows users to view and update existing databases, export them to theportable flat file format and to create new database files.

GNU Status Reports: October 2011

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GnuPG (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnupg)
From Werner Koch: The current stable versions of GnuPG are 1.4.11 and 2.0.18.
We are working towards a 2.1 version; a beta of that version is already used by Kontact
Touch (Kmail for smartphones). Progress is somewhat slow these days due to a lack offunding.
A major design change in 2.1 is the replacement of the secring.gpg secret key storage
by the protocol neutral secret key database maintained by the gpg-agent daemon. The
benefit of this is an architectural cleanup and easier key maintenance. We were also able toremove large amounts of code which were needed to maintain secring.gpg.
Support for Elliptic Curve cryptography as specified by an OpenPGP WG approved I-D
has been added to GPG.
We are working on a new database format to store the OpenPGP keys. This will help
to keep meta data on keys (e.g., time of last refresh from a keyserver) and greatly improve
lookup speeds on large keyrings.
The new G13 tool allows the use of OpenPGP keys for disk encryption. It is designed
to support several backends. Due to a lack of time we only support EncFS for now; in thenext steps we plan to support Geli and DM-crypt.
The CRL/OCSP and LDAP daemon Dirmngr is now a proper part of GnuPG. Work isunderway to move all key server helper programs into Dirmngr.
GnuPG is using GNU Pth to implement co-routines. Due to the now widespread availability of POSIX threads and the very rare use of GNU Pth by other projects, we decided
to drop Pth in favor of nPth, a simple new library to replace Pth using the systems’ native
threads implementation.

GNURadio(http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio)
From Tom Rondeau: GNU Radio has been evolving quickly throughout the past few years.
Leadership in the project changed in 2010 from Eric Blossom to Tom Rondeau. One partof this change is a renewed energy in developing the community and increasing the numberof contributors to the project. GNU Radio hosted its first conference on September 14–16
at the University of Pennsylvania. While due to space constraints, we had an initial limit offorty attendees, but request was so great that we ended up accommodating fifty-five people
from academia, industry, and government. The interest and user base of GNU Radio isstrong and growing, and we are excited to see the various ways the project is being used.
A large part of the discussion at the conference was how to contribute to the project, andfostering this environment will continue to be one of my primary short-term objectives. Allof the conference material will be made available on the main GNU Radio website (http://
www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio) as well as my personal web site (http://gnuradio.
squarespace.com).
In the current efforts of the development, we are actively integrating new features thatwill enable GNU Radio in ways that were never possible before. Two major features in GNU
Radio include a new vectorization library called VOLK (for Vector-Optimized Library of
Kernels) and stream tagging.

GNU Status Reports: October 2011

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VOLK provides a way to access the vector (i.e., SIMD) instructions of general purpose
processors. While there are other ways of doing this, a goal of GNU Radio is cross-platform
support and ease of programming and implementing new signal processing features. Until
VOLK, adding SIMD code to GNU Radio had been a difficult, assembly-driven process.
Instead, VOLK introduces the concept of a vector kernel to perform common mathematical
functions in a cross-platform library. Over the next year, we will be improving many ofthe low-level signal processing blocks by using VOLK kernels instead of generic C++ code.
As we make these changes, we expect to see a dramatic increase in the performance andprocessing capabilities of GNU Radio. A side benefit of this is the exposure of an extensible
vector library for anyone to use and build upon inside GNU Radio—or out, as VOLK is
not designed solely for GNU Radio use and builds as a separate library.
The other major additional capability introduced into GNU Radio is know as streamtags, which provide a method of annotating samples with tags of information that can bepassed downstream in a GNU Radio graph. This feature adds an interface so that control,
data, metadata, and other information may be passed through a communication system.
With these tags, we will be able to realize more advanced digital modems that require datalike logic control and timing information.
Version 3.6 of GNU Radio, to be released later this year, will include support for VOLK
and stream tags. Furthermore, we are working to migrate all over-the-air examples that
use the Ettus Research, LLC (ettus.com) hardware to the new UHD (Ettus’ Universal
Hardware Driver). This move helps us begin to standardize the hardware API layer thatwill be required to support various hardware platforms from a single software radio core.

GSEGrafix(http://www.gnu.org/software/gsegrafix)
From Spencer Buckner: GSEGrafix is a GNOME application which uses an anti-aliased
GNOME canvas for creating scientific and engineering plots. The program is written in
C and reads ASCII parameter files and data files. The parameter files contain keywords
and corresponding arguments for specifying plot parameters (such as data file names, data
file formats, plot type, plot style, axis type, axis labels, etc). Eleven example plots, corresponding examples of Octave code or C code for creating the data files, and corresponding
parameter files are included. The program can be run from a terminal window or from agraphical user interface.
The current version, gsegrafix-1.0.6, was uploaded on 10 September 2011. Thisversion adds the keywords background_color and background_image. The keyword
background_color enables the background color of the plot window to be specified aseither “white”, the default, or “black”; if black is chosen, the plot box, tick marks, axis
labels, title, and text are white. The keyword background_image enables a backgroundimage, such as a map, to be displayed in the plot box. The image can be scaled in four
different ways by specifying one of the parameter values: center, fill, scale, or zoom.

GNU Status Reports: October 2011

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Gtypist (http://www.gnu.org/software/gtypist)
From Tim Marston: we have added support for UTF-8, available in the current test releaseat http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gtypist. This affects all user input (from the keyboard)and all output (to the terminal)! In particular, we need people who have their machines
set up use other locales to check that gtypist accepts keyboard input correctly and displays
the right stuff to a UTF-8 terminal. Please help test.
We’ve also added a new set of typing courses for the Colemak keyboard layout. If anyone
uses Colemak and fancies trying out the lessons, we’d be grateful to hear if there are any
problems.
Other changes include a Spanish manual and tracking of personal best scores.

Mailutils (http://www.gnu.org/software/mailutils)
From Sergey Poznyakoff: GNU Mailutils is heading for the next major release. A major
rewrite of the I/O subsystem has been finished, considerably improving performance. Several other parts of the framework have also undergone a revision. In general, the codebase has reached a stable state and most of the work now is concentrated on writing the
documentation.

Maverik (http://www.gnu.org/software/maverik)
From Hartmut Rosch: I have been working on GNU Maverik quite a long time and I havetaken the oppertunity to become the new maintainer. Maverik 6.4 works fine on 32-bit
machines but has several bugs rendering the bitmaps on a 64-bit system. This has been
fixed. In addition to that the Makefile has got a distclean target to delete all sharedlibraries in the lib directory and all executables. The new version, Maverik 6.5, will be
released quite soon.

RCS (http://www.gnu.org/software/rcs)
From Thien-Thi Nguyen: GNU RCS 5.8 was recently released (the first release in many
years), with some small bugfixes, portability enhancements, and new Texinfo documentation. This author is the new maintainer.

GNU Status Reports: October 20118

Sqltutor (http://www.gnu.org/software/sqltutor)
From Ales Cepek: GNU Sqltutor is a web based interactive tutorial for Structured Query
Language (SQL).
You can try Sqltutor online at http://sqltutor.fsv.cvut.cz/cgi-bin/sqltutor.
First, a tutorial must be selected from the opening page and started. A series of tutorial
questions follows in a simple dialog. When finished, Sqltutor displays final evaluation withthe review of all questions asked during the session together with user’s SQL queries andcorrect answers for wrong solutions.
Sqltutor is implemented on the top of a relational database system PostgreSQL. The
program is a CGI script that selects SQL questions from its database, checks the answers
and evaluates the final score. The second part of the project is a free collection of SQL
questions and answers representing SQL tutorials. Sqltutor enables the running of one ormore tutorials in different languages from a single database.
The C++ code and database schema are stable; what is most needed is to add a set oftutorial questions and answers in good English, and we need help from native speaker withsome knowledge of SQL. Currently we actively use only a tutorial in the Czech language.
Please write bug-sqltutor@gnu.org if you’d like to get involved.

Tar (http://www.gnu.org/software/tar)
From Sergey Poznyakoff: Tar version 1.26 was released this year. It is mostly a bug-fixing
release. The most important changes:• A bug in the --verify option, introduced in version 1.24, is now fixed.
• Fixed storing the long sparse file names in PAX archives.
• Work around POSIX incompatibilities on FreeBSD, NetBSD and Tru64.
• Fix bug with --one-file-system --listed-incremental used together.

GNU Status Reports: October 20119

Wdiff (http://www.gnu.org/software/wdiff)From Martin von Gagern: GNU wdiff is a front end to diff for comparing files on a word
per word basis. A word is anything between whitespace. This is useful for comparing two
texts in which a few words have been changed and for which paragraphs have been refilled.
It works by creating two temporary files, one word per line, and then executes diff on thesefiles. It collects the diff output and uses it to produce a nicer display of word differences
between the original files.
The latest release was numbered 1.0.0, reflecting the fact that the code has been aroundfor a long time and is therefore considered quite mature. So consider this change not somuch as a radical program improvement of some kind, but rather a fix to the fact that somepeople tend to take a major version number of zero as an indication of immature software.
Although the NEWS entry for this release is a bit longer than for some past releases, interms of features and bug fixes it might as well have been called 0.6.6.
So what has changed? As user noticeable changes we have updated translations for
Dutch, French, Danish and Slovenian, as well as a completely new translation file for
Ukrainian, thanks to Yuri Chornoivan. The code will now give more useful results when
the diff program either cannot be executed or fails for some reason.
Build time improvements include an update of our gnulib imports as well as an extensionof the test suite. On the source code level, there was some cleaning up, slightly improved
portability with respect to file descriptor duplication, and a unification of coding styleaccomplished through GNU Indent.

Xboard (http://www.gnu.org/software/xboard)
From Arun Persaud: XBoard is a graphical user interface to chess in all its major forms(and many others). Over the last year XBoard development has seen three new releases(4.5.x) fixing lots of bugs and including many new features and some redesign of the GUI.
An ongoing effort is to merge the code of XBoard and its so-called “Winboard” companion back into one code base. we are now closer than ever to completely this task. To thisend the effort to update the GUI and to move to GTK has been restarted. Nevertheless,
we can always need more help! If you are interested in this and are willing to help, pleasecontact us at xboard-devel@gnu.org. You can of course also contact us to discuss otherissues/ideas too.

Xnee (http://www.gnu.org/software/xnee)
From Henrik Sandklef: Xnee is a suite of programs that can record, replay and distributeuser actions under the X11 environment. Think of it as a robot that can imitate the job
you just did. The latest version is 3.10, released in August 2011.

GNU Status Reports: October 201110

Xorriso (http://www.gnu.org/software/xorriso)
From Thomas Schmitt: GNU xorriso creates, loads, manipulates and writes ISO 9660
filesystem images with Rock Ridge extensions. Optionally it supports hard links, ACLs,
xattr, and MD5 checksums. xorriso writes its images to CD, DVD, Blu-ray or to filesystemobjects; conversely, xorriso is able to copy file objects from ISO 9660 filesystems to disk.
In its role as feature-enhanced mkisofs emulator, it serves underneath the GRUB2 script
grub-mkrescue and it produces the installation images of Debian GNU/Linux.
GNU xorriso is widely portable, although its capability to burn CD, DVD, and Blu-ray iscurrently restricted to GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. Porting this capability to otheroperating systems is mainly a matter of knowing how to pass SCSI/MMC command transactions through the operating system kernel to burner drives attached via SCSI, (P)ATA,
SATA, USB, or other busses.
Development is currently focused on improving xorriso behavior in rather unusual situations and, of course, on hunting down any bugs. Recent improvements are:
• Recording and restoring ACLs and extattr on FreeBSD.
• More rugged with non-persistent device names in modern GNU/Linux distributions.
• Making media readable which were left damaged after burner failures.
• Production of Jigdo files which can be put together to form a bootable ISO 9660 image,e.g. for installing Debian GNU/Linux.
• ISOLINUX bootable images with a MBR partition table that bears the mountable ISO
at a partition with non-zero start address.
Contact point: bug-xorriso@gnu.org.