I am happy to announce the first release of GNU poke, version 1.0. The tarball poke-1.0.tar.gz is now available at https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/poke/poke-1.0.tar.gz.
GNU poke (http://www.jemarch.net/poke) is an interactive, extensible editor for binary data. Not limited to editing basic entities such as bits and bytes, it provides a full-fledged procedural, interactive programming language designed to describe data structures and to operate on them. This release is the product of 3 years of work resulting in 4126 commits, made by 19 contributors. The program is far from being perfect and there are known bugs and limitations in place. We also have lots of awesome ideas still to be implemented, extensions we want to add, pickles for many data formats to write, documentation to improve, and lots of work in progress... the GUI, the machine-interface... working in poke is so fun that it is difficult to stop :'D But it is time to start the releasing cycles so everyone can benefit from poke, which is already immensely useful for many activities like systems programming, testing of software, design and documentation of file formats and protocols, reverse engineering, and much more. Releasing often will hopefully also bring in more developers to our little but enthusiastic community... there is so much to do! In any case, we wish you have fun with poke and that you find it useful. Please send us comments, suggestions, bug reports, *patches*, questions, complaints, bitcoins, or whatever, to poke-de...@gnu.org. Many of the poke developers and users populate the #poke IRC channel at irc.freenode.net, and you are more than welcome to join us there and say hello. Now it is time to mention the names of all the people who have contributed with code and/or documentation to this release. In certain but no significant order they are: John Darrington Tim Rühsen Luca Saiu Bruno Haible Mohammad-Reza Nabipoor Eric Blake Egeyar Bagcioglu Kostas Chasialis Darshit Shah Dan Čermák David Faust Carlo Caione Henner Zeller Aurelien Aptel Indu Bhagat Darkstar Michael Drüing Pierre-Evariste Dagand My gratitude to you all! It is a real pleasure to hack with you. Finally, as a personal note, I would like to dedicate this release to my father Eduardo. For this is also your work in a sense, and I love you very much. And this is all for now. Happy poking! -- Jose E. Marchesi Frankfurt am Main 26 February 2021 -- 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.