Recode 3.7 released [stable]

[Reuben Thomas]

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