GNU Planet!

GNU Parallel 20220122 ('20 years') [stable] has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4

No new functionality was introduced so this is a good candidate for a stable release.

Quote of the month:

  I'm going to make GNU parallel my new superpower this year.
    -- Christian G. Warden @xn@twitter

New in this release:

• GNU Parallel turned 20 on the 2022-01-06 https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/20th-birthday.html

• Bug fixes and man page updates.

News about GNU Parallel:

• Save Time with Modern Search Techniques https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ohio-information-security-forum-january-2022-monthly-meeting-tickets-240632737997

• Bash "Fail immediately if any fails" https://morioh.com/p/a01b883dc57c

• Re-encoding the EmacsConf videos with FFmpeg and GNU Parallel https://sachachua.com/blog/2021/12/re-encoding-the-emacsconf-videos-with-ffmpeg-and-gnu-parallel/

• Bash 平行 https://learntutorials.net/ja/bash/topic/10778/%E5%B9%B3%E8%A1%8C

Get the book: GNU Parallel 2018 http://www.lulu.com/shop/ole-tange/gnu-parallel-2018/paperback/product-23558902.html

GNU Parallel - For people who live life in the parallel lane.

If you like GNU Parallel record a video testimonial: Say who you are, what you use GNU Parallel for, how it helps you, and what you like most about it. Include a command that uses GNU Parallel if you feel like it.

GNU Parallel is a shell tool for executing jobs in parallel using one or more computers. A job can be a single command or a small script that has to be run for each of the lines in the input. The typical input is a list of files, a list of hosts, a list of users, a list of URLs, or a list of tables. A job can also be a command that reads from a pipe. GNU Parallel can then split the input and pipe it into commands in parallel.

If you use xargs and tee today you will find GNU Parallel very easy to use as GNU Parallel is written to have the same options as xargs. If you write loops in shell, you will find GNU Parallel may be able to replace most of the loops and make them run faster by running several jobs in parallel. GNU Parallel can even replace nested loops.

GNU Parallel makes sure output from the commands is the same output as you would get had you run the commands sequentially. This makes it possible to use output from GNU Parallel as input for other programs.

For example you can run this to convert all jpeg files into png and gif files and have a progress bar:

  parallel --bar convert {1} {1.}.{2} ::: *.jpg ::: png gif

Or you can generate big, medium, and small thumbnails of all jpeg files in sub dirs:

  find . -name '*.jpg' |
    parallel convert -geometry {2} {1} {1//}/thumb{2}_{1/} :::: - ::: 50 100 200

You can find more about GNU Parallel at: http://www.gnu.org/s/parallel/

You can install GNU Parallel in just 10 seconds with:

    $ (wget -O - pi.dk/3 || lynx -source pi.dk/3 || curl pi.dk/3/ || \
       fetch -o - http://pi.dk/3 ) > install.sh
    $ sha1sum install.sh | grep c82233e7da3166308632ac8c34f850c0
    12345678 c82233e7 da316630 8632ac8c 34f850c0
    $ md5sum install.sh | grep ae3d7aac5e15cf3dfc87046cfc5918d2
    ae3d7aac 5e15cf3d fc87046c fc5918d2
    $ sha512sum install.sh | grep dfc00d823137271a6d96225cea9e89f533ff6c81f
    9c5198d5 31a3b755 b7910ece 3a42d206 c804694d fc00d823 137271a6 d96225ce
    a9e89f53 3ff6c81f f52b298b ef9fb613 2d3f9ccd 0e2c7bd3 c35978b5 79acb5ca
    $ bash install.sh

Watch the intro video on http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL284C9FF2488BC6D1

Walk through the tutorial (man parallel_tutorial). Your command line will love you for it.

When using programs that use GNU Parallel to process data for publication please cite:

O. Tange (2018): GNU Parallel 2018, March 2018, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1146014.

If you like GNU Parallel:

• Give a demo at your local user group/team/colleagues
• Post the intro videos on Reddit/Diaspora*/forums/blogs/ Identi.ca/Google+/Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin/mailing lists
• Get the merchandise https://gnuparallel.threadless.com/designs/gnu-parallel
• Request or write a review for your favourite blog or magazine
• Request or build a package for your favourite distribution (if it is not already there)
• Invite me for your next conference

If you use programs that use GNU Parallel for research:

• Please cite GNU Parallel in you publications (use --citation)

If GNU Parallel saves you money:

• (Have your company) donate to FSF https://my.fsf.org/donate/

GNU sql aims to give a simple, unified interface for accessing databases through all the different databases' command line clients. So far the focus has been on giving a common way to specify login information (protocol, username, password, hostname, and port number), size (database and table size), and running queries.

The database is addressed using a DBURL. If commands are left out you will get that database's interactive shell.

When using GNU SQL for a publication please cite:

O. Tange (2011): GNU SQL - A Command Line Tool for Accessing Different Databases Using DBURLs, ;login: The USENIX Magazine, April 2011:29-32.

GNU niceload slows down a program when the computer load average (or other system activity) is above a certain limit. When the limit is reached the program will be suspended for some time. If the limit is a soft limit the program will be allowed to run for short amounts of time before being suspended again. If the limit is a hard limit the program will only be allowed to run when the system is below the limit.

https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/freeipmi/freeipmi-1.6.9.tar.gz

o Support --with-systemconfigdir build option.
o Fix build issue on musl where putmsg/getmsg are not available.
o Fix build issue when inb/outb are not available on some systems.
o Fix static build issues with gcrypt.
o Add conserver documentation in faq.
o Minor documentation updates.

The Guix hackers are very happy to announce the second online Guix Days Conference on 19 & 20 February 2022. This conference is open to everyone and will be held entirely online. Want to speak? Submit your proposal!

Important dates:

1. February 8: Deadline for talks proposal.
2. February 12: Deadline for releasing your pre-recorded talks.
3. February 14: Release of the schedule.
4. February 19: Conference day!
5. February 20: Conference day!

The agenda of these two days is:

• pre-recorded talks with live question and answer sessions
• birds of a feather (BoF) sessions
• lightning round talks, if possible
• retrospective and future of Guix
• hack together

Talks will be released before the conference day, watch them as soon as possible! And: no registration fee.

Propose your talks by sending them to guix-days@gnu.org. Feel free to drop in #guix on irc.libera.chat to discuss what you would like to talk about before submitting. :)

You can choose one of the following formats:

• Standard talk. 15-45 minutes pre-recorded presentation and a 5 minutes lightning talk. The 5-minute presentation will be live, to refresh our minds, followed by a 30 minutes live Q&A.
• BoF (birds of a feather, for a session with a small group who wants to talk about a specific topic) with no presentation. You may prepare something live to spark conversations.
• Lightning talk with a 5 minutes live presentation

In addition to the format you would like to choose, please describe your session with 10 lines or more (for lightning talks, at least 1 sentence).

Once you have sent your proposal, you will be notified in the following days whether your talk will be part of the Guix Days. Submit earlier to get more time to prepare your session!

Even for live presentation, please prepare a back-up pre-recorded talk, so we can play it if you cannot attend or have a technical problem during the Guix days. The deadline for short presentations (5 minutes) is February 16.

We welcome all kinds of topics from the community, especially your own experience with Guix, your cool projects that involve Guix in some way, infrastructure around guix (translations, continuous integration, ...), and any subject you feel should be discussed during the conference.

We particularly encourage people who consider themselves part of a group underrepresented in Guix and the broader free software movement to submit a talk. Do not hesitate to get in touch with the organizers at guix-days@gnu.org if unsure or if you would like guidance on how to prepare your talk.

Please make sure your talk is accessible to a non-expert audience, for instance by explaining the general context before diving into technical descriptions, and by avoiding acronyms and jargon.

We accept talks in languages other than English provided English subtitles are included.

Have a look at the topics from the last conference for ideas, but don't hesitate to innovate in your proposals!

The aim of the pre-recorded talks is to demonstrate new features, what you are hacking on, introduce the subject for easing the live question and answer sessions or BoFs. These pre-recorded talks should be 15–45 minutes long. Feel free to ask if you need help with the recording.

You are free to choose whichever storage platform you want (e.g., your own website, a PeerTube instance, a Nextcloud instance, etc.), but we will need to have access to the original file so we can publish it later on audio-video.gnu.org. Your video must be released under a license that at least allows anyone to copy and share it, for any purpose.

You will have to release the video publicly before February 12, so everyone has a chance to see it before the conference. If you are not able to do so (for instance your server cannot handle a huge load), you can alternatively send us a private link to the video and we will upload it on audio-video.gnu.org. If you decide to do so, you will need to have the video ready by February 10.

But don't miss the Fosdem conference either!

Be sure to watch the pre-recorded talks before the conference. There will be no presentations on the 19 nor 20.

Coming soon! Stay tuned.

This online conference is an official Guix event. Therefore, the Code of Conduct applies. Please be sure to read it beforehand!

GNU Guix is a transactional package manager and an advanced distribution of the GNU system that respects user freedom. Guix can be used on top of any system running the Hurd or the Linux kernel, or it can be used as a standalone operating system distribution for i686, x86_64, ARMv7, and AArch64 machines.

In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection. When used as a standalone GNU/Linux distribution, Guix offers a declarative, stateless approach to operating system configuration management. Guix is highly customizable and hackable through Guile programming interfaces and extensions to the Scheme language.

I’m delighted to announce a new release of GNU hello.  This version has many minor fixes and improvements made in the last eight years.

• Noteworthy changes in release 2.11 (2022-01-05) [stable]

Remove -h and -v short options.

Various code tidying, including avoiding forward declarations, removing dead code, new test for multibyte strings, better use of gnulib, update to more recent gnulib and add git hooks from coreutils.

For some time already, Ludovic and Marius have voiced their desire to step down from the Guix maintainers collective. An email announcing the news and calling for new maintainers was sent more than 4 months ago. We're very happy to announce that Efraim Flashner has responded to the call and accepted to join the Guix maintainers collective! Efraim has been with Guix for a long time -- the first recorded Git history of their activity goes back to 2015, and they have since authored more than 6000 commits! More importantly, Efraim has demonstrated traits we value for a co-maintainer, such as good communication and collaboration abilities, values that align well with those of the GNU project and overall a person you'd like to hang out with at FOSDEM :-).

We're sad to see Ludovic and Marius step down from their current duties, but we take comfort knowing they will remain among us for the good hacks and occasional guidance. Loosing them as co-maintainer will be a difficult test for the remaining Guix co-maintainers. Ludovic's wit, relentless energy, tactful communication and wise planning have been invaluable to the Guix project throughout the years. Ludovic has mentioned this decision was at least partly based on their desire to guard Guix against the Founder's syndrome, which is something we can only applaud. Marius has served as co-maintainer since October 2019. Their calm, composed attitude has helped us navigating through at times difficult situations, and their technical wizardry has brought us the likes of ungoogled-chromium and a Ganeti service, among many others.

Let's take a moment to say thank you to Ludovic and Marius for their valuable years as maintainers, and wish they can enjoy their newfound extra time :-).

Let's also wish a warm welcome to Efraim. Thank you for stepping up to become a co-maintainer, Efraim!

The Guix maintainer collective now consists of Efraim Flashner, Mathieu Othacehe, Maxim Cournoyer and Tobias Geerinckx-Rice. You can reach us all by email at guix-maintainers@gnu.org, a private alias.

For information about the responsibilities assumed by the Guix co-maintainers, you are encouraged to read a previous blog post that covered the topic.

GNU Guix is a transactional package manager and an advanced distribution of the GNU system that respects user freedom. Guix can be used on top of any system running the Hurd or the Linux kernel, or it can be used as a standalone operating system distribution for i686, x86_64, ARMv7, AArch64 and POWER9 machines.

In addition to standard package management features, Guix supports transactional upgrades and roll-backs, unprivileged package management, per-user profiles, and garbage collection. When used as a standalone GNU/Linux distribution, Guix offers a declarative, stateless approach to operating system configuration management. Guix is highly customizable and hackable through Guile programming interfaces and extensions to the Scheme language.

On 2022-01-06 GNU Parallel will be 20 years old. The birthday is an opportunity to take stock.

https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/20th-birthday.html

Download from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libunistring/libunistring-1.0.tar.gz

This is a stable release.

New in this release:

• The license has changed from "LGPLv3+ or GPLv2" to "LGPLv3+ or GPLv2+".

• The data tables and algorithms have been updated to Unicode version 14.0.0.

• The functions u8_uctomb, u16_uctomb, u32_uctomb now support strings larger than 2 GiB by taking an 'n' argument of type ptrdiff_t (instead of int).

• The functions u*_possible_linebreaks and u*_width_linebreaks now make it easier to work with strings that contain CR-LF sequences: In this case, in the returned array, it will return UC_BREAK_CR_BEFORE_LF followed by UC_BREAK_MANDATORY (instead of twice UC_BREAK_MANDATORY).

• There are new properties for recognizing pictographic symbols and regional indicators:

    - UC_PROPERTY_EMOJI                  uc_is_property_emoji
    - UC_PROPERTY_EMOJI_PRESENTATION     uc_is_property_emoji_presentation
    - UC_PROPERTY_EMOJI_MODIFIER         uc_is_property_emoji_modifier
    - UC_PROPERTY_EMOJI_MODIFIER_BASE    uc_is_property_emoji_modifier_base
    - UC_PROPERTY_EMOJI_COMPONENT        uc_is_property_emoji_component
    - UC_PROPERTY_EXTENDED_PICTOGRAPHIC  uc_is_property_extended_pictographic
    - UC_PROPERTY_REGIONAL_INDICATOR     uc_is_property_regional_indicator

• Fixed multithread-safety bugs on Cygwin, native Windows, and Haiku.

Dear zh-cn-translators:

Thank you all for the help in 2021. Here comes the summary of www.gnu.org translation from GNU.

Please take your time to read. We are doing almost as good as 2020.

Dear GNU translators!

This year, the total number of new translations was approximately
like in 2020, but their mean size was almost twice as large.
Nearly every third new translation was made in the Brazilian
Portuguese team; the Albanian and ("Traditional") Chinese teams
made four times more translations than in 2020.

      General Statistics

In October, we reached new maximum values of translations per file
in important directories, 9.32 translations per file (0.4 more
than in 2020) and 8.39 translations weighted with size of articles
(0.15 more than in 2020).

The percent of outdated translations was considerably higher
than in 2020, mostly due to more commits this year.

The table below shows the number and size of newly translated
articles in important directories (as of 2021-12-31) and
typical number of outdated GNUNified translations throughout
the year.

+--team--+------new-------+---outdated-+
|  es    |  17 (146.6Ki)  |  2.5 (1%)  |
+--------+----------------+------------+
|  fr    |   5 (237.0Ki)  |  3.0 (1%)  |
+--------+----------------+------------+
|  it    |   7 ( 56.0Ki)  |  50 (37%)  |
+--------+----------------+------------+
|  ja    |   0 (  0.0Ki)  |  30 (21%)  |
+--------+----------------+------------+
|  ml    |   1 ( 53.2Ki)  |  21 (63%)  |
+--------+----------------+------------+
|  pl    |   0 (  0.0Ki)  |  54 (37%)  |
+--------+----------------+------------+
|  pt-br |  49 (1227.3Ki) |  36 (17%)  |
+--------+----------------+------------+
|  ru    |   8 (238.6Ki)  |  3.0 (1%)  |
+--------+----------------+------------+
|  sq    |  34 (308.7Ki)  | 3.0 (6.6%) |
+--------+----------------+------------+
|  tr    |  21 (279.6Ki)  | 4.4 (3.5%) |
+--------+----------------+------------+
|  zh-cn |  11 (334.7Ki)  | 6.7 (4.3%) |
+--------+----------------+------------+
|  zh-tw |  10 (168.1Ki)  |  23 (51%)  |
+--------+----------------+------------+
+--------+----------------+
| total  | 163 (3049.8Ki) |
+--------+----------------+

For the reference: 5 new articles were added, amounting to 237Ki
(one of them was proprietary/all.html, about 130Ki, consisting
mostly of entries already present in other pages from proprietary/),
and there were over 1000 changes in about 300 English files
in the important directories.

Like in 2020, few translations were converted to the gettext format,
so that column is missing this year.  Among the active teams, only
the ("Traditional") Chinese team has translations to convert
(15 files, 228.6Ki), and the total number of unconverted translations
is 55 (1062.8Ki).

      Orphaned Teams, New and Reformed Teams

The ("Traditional") Chinese team changed its leader.  The Farsi
team was re-established in May, but no commits in www have followed
yet.  Korean, Serbian, Ukrainian teams were declared inactive
(no commits for more than 3 years).  The Italian team
is re-organizing.

There were unsuccessful attempts to establish or resurrect teams
for Hindi, Arabic, Malay, Finnish, Catalan.

      Changes in the Page Regeneration System

GNUN had two releases this year, 1.1 and 1.2, the most important
changes were in validation procedures: the SSI expansion was made
closer to Apache behavior, the DTD was updated to remove obsolete
elements and add new attributes.

Happy GNU year, and thank you for your contributions!

(I see nothing secret in this message, so if you think it may be
interesting to people who are not subscribed to the list, please
feel free to forward it).

Happy New Year!
wxie

GNU Alive 2.0.5 is available.  Full announcement:

• https://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2022-01/msg00004.html

GNU Alive is a keep-alive program for internet connections.

GNU rush version 2.2 is available for download.

New in this version:

New predicates, designed after options to the "test" system command, check for file types. modes and ownership.  For example

  rule
    match -d /var/lock/sd

will match if /var/lock/sd exists on diks and is a directory

This fixes handling of transform expressions like "s/X/@/2".

Version 3.14 of GNU mailutils is available for download.

New in this release:

• TLS support rewritten from scratch

• • New configuration statement: tls.handshake-timeout

• Fix idle timeout handling (imap4d and pop3d daemons)

• New function mu_mailbox_append_message_ext

• mail utility

• • new command: unread (U)

• • message state is preserved when copying to another mailbox

• Build requires GNU bison and flex

• All parsers and scanners are rewritten in reentrant form

• Support for mimetypes incorporated to the libmailutils library

• Maildir and MH mailboxes

• • Change the way of storing the envelope information

• • Message scanner completely rewritten

• Bugfixes

• • Fix timezone calculation (see https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?61239)

• • Fixed some memory and fd leaks

• • Fixed corner case in mu_make_file_name_suf function

GNU Alive 2.0.4 is available.  Full announcement:

• https://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2022-01/msg00000.html

GNU Alive is a keep-alive program for internet connections.