Announcing sox_ng-14.4.3

[Martin Guy <martinwguy@gmail.com>]

# sox_ng: First release announcement


I am happy (with some trepidation) to announce the first release of sox_ng,

a new project to unify the work in the 50 distros and the plethora of

development forks and branches and make six-monthly micro (bug fix)

and minor (new features) releases of SoX.

Its objectives are to:
- facilitate package maintainers' work
- reassure developers that they can work on SoX knowing that their work
   can be released within predictable time
- unify the current plethora of independent development efforts

- follow the style and vision of Chris Bagwell's SoXen


The next releases are scheduled for 2024-10-18 (minor) and 2025-02-18 
(micro).

## sox_ng novelties

Differences between sox_ng and the hundred-odd different SoXen in the
software distributions and the dozens of innovative forks are:
- it fixes all the CVEs open against sox
- it does regression tests against all the CVEs and some other bugs
- it makes (almost) no compiler warnings
- it compiles and the regression tests succeed on all the machines of 
the GCC Compile Farm on
   - amd64, arm-{32,64}, aarch64, chrp32be, mips64be, powerpc-64{le,be},
     riscv-64, sun4v-64be, x86-{32,64}
   - AIX, Almalinux, Alpine, Archlinux, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD, MacOS X,
     OpenBSD, OpenSUSE, Solaris, Ubuntu
- its wiki is in the source tree
- issues will live in the source tree
- its copyright status has been sorted out. As a work, SoX is GPLv2 as is
   the libsox library which had wrongly been declared LGPL
   (src/opus.c is based on oggenc.c, which is GPLv2-only.)
   Individual source files retain their more permissive licenses.
- Distro-specific notes for package maintainers are in the wiki
- It is fully usable from the command line except for
   only being able to download the issues,
   not push modifications or new issues yet. It will.
- it has public accounting and accepts donations
   but doesn't really have any expenses so, instead,
   donations can be earmarked as bounties for
   whoever resolves a particular issue satisfactorily.

## Places

- The public sox_ng code repository, wiki and issues are visible on
   codeberg.org/sox_ng/sox_ng with a hot backup on disroot.org/sox_ng/sox_ng
- A mailing list: sox-ng@groups.io to post, sox-ng+subscribe@groups.io 
to subscribe

## Where to go next

If this is interesting, either fetch a tarball from

https://codeberg.org/sox_ng/sox_ng/releases
or browse it on https://codeberg.org/sox_ng/sox_ng

README.md is a good place to start for an overview.


## Thanks

My heartfelt thanks go to:
* the historical sox developers for so much good public work
* the people who wrote the immense body of DSP code that SoX unites
* codeberg.org support for prompt and courteous resolution
* eneiev of the FSF for copyright insight
* the GCC Compile Farm staff for creating such an incredible tool
* the many people who have kept the candle of SoX development alight



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