I am happy to announce a new release of Recode, after almost ten years. Although Recode is no longer a GNU project, I think it deserves an announcement here.
The release is noteworthy for other reasons: it represents a major overhaul to the codebase, with many bug fixes, a modernized build system, and a few significant simplifications. Recode remains a mature package, mostly of interest for use with legacy data (since text encodings are much less of a feature of most people's everyday experience), but since it harnesses the power of iconv, it is nonetheless up to date. This release also adds some new encodings, all bibliographic in nature: ANSEL, ISO5426, and BibTeX. The release is also noteworthy in that it's the first not made by its original author, François Pinard, who sadly died a few years ago. It was François who brought Recode to GNU, and he who took it away again. I might well make it a GNU project again, but it seemed more respectful to leave that for the future. For now, Recode may be found at: https://github.com/rrthomas/recode Many thanks to all those who helped with this release; in particular to Shlomi Fish for sparking my interest by bringing another old program, fortune-mod, up to date, and complaining about memory leaks in recode; to Santiago Vila, the Debian maintainer, and Bruno Haible, both of whom helped me work out what happened to François, and discover that his last known public email[1] expressed a wish that someone else would take the project on; to Wolfram Schneider for his 20-year-old ANSEL and ISO5426 patches, which are finally installed, and to all those who submitted bug reports and patches to the Debian Bug Tracking System. [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=748984#10 -- https://rrt.sc3d.org -- 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.
