GNU Automake’s first update in 15 months adds an optional archive-format feature and fixes a 14-year-old distribution bug.
The 32-year-old GNU Automake tool to help with the drudgery of endless strings of ./configure, make, make install hell, yesterday announced its first new release in 15 months. The announcement came as an email from the project’s co-maintainer Kamila Szewczyk to various Gnu mailing lists.
GNU Automake 1.19 is being called a minor release with good reason. Even if it were officially slated to be a major point release, it would be relatively minor as it rolls out the door with exactly one new feature and a few bug fixes.
The new feature, aptly called AM_OPTIONAL_AUTOMAKE, is an autoconf macro that allows software packages to ask for `dist-XXX’ formats that are built only if the matching compression tool is actually installed. If not, it just moves on as if nothing was the matter. Previously, listed but missing tools caused a failure.
There are 11 bug fixes in all, including one that’s been on the books for 14 years — which means that by now most users will have muscle memory well trained to avoid the issue.
In this case, the make dist-bzip2 dist-xz command is now functional, which was made possible by another fix that’s included in the release. The previous problem was with an uncompressed tarball that was deleted after the first goal, making all future goals fail. That’s been fixed by making sure that the tarball isn’t deleted until after the last goal is done.
For more information and downloads, visit the GNU Automake home page.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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