Dear all,

I am happy to announce the 17th official release of GNU Astronomy
Utilities (Gnuastro).

As you see in [1] below, many useful new features have been added,
and many bugs have been found and fixed. Thanks to 8 people who
directly committed into Gnuastro's source (4 women and 4 men), and
20 people providing ideas that have been impleted (see below for
the names). This is a new record in Gnuastro! Thanks for helping
make Gnuastro better with your great contributions and feedback :-).

Here is the compressed source and the GPG detached signature for
this release. To uncompress Lzip tarballs, see [2]. To check the
validity of the tarballs using the GPG detached signature (*.sig)
see [3]:

  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.17.tar.lz     (3.8MB)
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.17.tar.lz.sig  (833B)
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.17.tar.gz     (6.0MB)
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.17.tar.gz.sig  (833B)

Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums (other ways to check if the
tarball you download is what we distributed). Just note that the
SHA256 checksum is base64 encoded, instead of the hexadecimal encoding
that most checksum tools default to.

a14313670e0bb7f3127ffba00a935aadc441bbc5  gnuastro-0.17.tar.lz
8M02HvN6iflxKk/2MfW5dT2EADwE2tr7NaXQpLs6A78  gnuastro-0.17.tar.lz
666986a1e39b513f330fffec480e083c1d37d3e2  gnuastro-0.17.tar.gz
xBvtM8wkDOqXg/Q2dNfPR0R0ZgRm4QiPJZoLDKivaPU  gnuastro-0.17.tar.gz

I am very grateful to (in alphabetical order) Pedram Ashofteh
Ardakani, Sepideh Eskandarlou, Zahra Hosseini Shahisavandi, Raul
Infante-Sainz, Sachin Kumar Singh, Elham Saremi and Nafise Sedighi for
their direct contribution to the source of Gnuastro. Also, Sergio
Chueca Urzay, Tamara Civera Lorenzo, Andres Del Pino Molina, Alexey
Dokuchaev, Alessandro Ederoclite, Sepideh Eskandarlou, Juan Antonio
Fernández Ontiveros, Zohreh Ghaffari, Giulia Golini, Martin Guerrero
Roncel, Zahra Hosseini, Raúl Infante-Sainz, Alejandro Lumbreras Calle,
Sebastian Luna-Valero, Samane Raji, Ignacio Ruiz Cejudo, Manuel
Sánchez-Benavente, Peter Teuben, Jesús Varela and Aaron Watkins
provided many good suggestions and helped in finding many bugs in the
code, tutorials and documentation.

If any of Gnuastro's programs or libraries are useful in your work,
please cite _and_ acknowledge them. For citation and acknowledgment
guidelines, run the relevant programs with a `--cite' option (it can
be different for different programs, so run it for all the programs
you use). Citations _and_ acknowledgments are vital for the continued
work on Gnuastro, so please don't forget to support us by doing so.

This tarball was bootstrapped (created) with the tools below. Note
that you don't need these to build Gnuastro from the tarball, these
are the tools that were used to make the tarball itself. They are only
mentioned here to be able to reproduce/recreate this tarball later.
  Texinfo 6.8
  Autoconf 2.71
  Automake 1.16.4
  Help2man 1.49.1
  ImageMagick 7.1.0-27
  Gnulib v0.1-5187-g2ca890b564
  Autoconf archives v2022.02.11-1-g203f15b

The dependencies to build Gnuastro from this tarball on your system
are described here:
  https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Dependencies.html

Best wishes,
Mohammad

As beloved Unix pioneer Brian Kernighan approaches his 80th birthday, he made a special appearance at this year’s Linux Conference Australia. At the traditional January event — held virtually for the second year in a row — Kernighan reminisced on the 1970s and “The early days of Unix at Bell Labs,” always careful to acknowledge the contributions of others, and of those developers who’d preceded him.

Kernighan also used the occasion to reflect on the lessons to be learned from the history of the Unix operating system, from the C programming language, and even from Microsoft’s foray into Unix — ultimately asking the poignant question of whether a Unix-like phenomenon could ever happen again.

And finally, Kernighan also looked to the future, and expressed a sincere hope that the talk might “perhaps teach us something about how software development can be done effectively, and perhaps how to manage people and processes to make them as productive as possible.”

The Ringo is a fun and exciting educational kit, a do-it-yourself build your own mobile phone set that actually functions with micro SIM cards.

Plots is a graph plotting app for GNOME. Plots makes it easy to visualize mathematical formulae. In addition to basic arithmetic operations, it supports trigonometric, hyperbolic, exponential and logarithmic functions, as well as arbitrary sums and products. It can display polar equations, and both implicit and explicit Cartesian equations.