Announcing sox_ng

[sox-ng <sox-ng@proton.me>]

= sox_ng: First release announcement

SoX_ng is a new project to unify the plethora of development forks and branches
and make six-monthly micro and minor releases of SoX,
the Swiss Army Knife of command-line audio processing.

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

The next releases are scheduled for 2024-08-18 (micro) and 2024-10-18 (minor).

## 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 has a regression test suite against the CVEs and other bugs
- it makes (almost) no compiler warnings
- it compiles and the regression tests succeed on most of
  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
- the wiki is in the source tree
- open issues are in the source tree
- its copyright status has been sorted out. As a work SoX is GPLv2 as is
  the libsox library which had werongly 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,
  domations can be earmarked as bounties for
  whoever resolves a particular issue satisfactorily.

## Places
- There is a tarball of the first release candidate at
  https://codeberg.org/sox_ng/sox_ng/releases/download/sox_ng-14.4.3-rc1/sox_ng-14.4.3-rc1.tar.gz
- The public sox_ng code repository, wiki and issues are visible on
  https://codeberg.org/sox_ng/sox_ng with a hot backup on https://git.disroot.org/sox_ng/sox_ng
- A mailing list: sox_ng@freelists.org
  (email sox_ng-request@freelists.org with Subject: subscribe)
- A private email: sox_ng@proton.me

## 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 and proton.me support for prompt and courteous resolution
* eneiev of the FSF for copyright insight
* the GCC Compile Farm staff for creating such an incredible tool
* those brave souls who have kept the candle of SoX development alight