-------- Original Message -------- Subject: GNU Automake 1.11 released Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 19:52:38 +0200 From: Ralf Wildenhues <Ralf.Wildenhues@gmx.de> Reply-To: bug-automake@gnu.org To: automake@gnu.org, autotools-announce@gnu.org, info-gnu@gnu.org We're pleased to announce the release of Automake 1.11. Automake is a tool for automatically generating `Makefile.in's suitable for use with Autoconf, compliant with the GNU Makefile standards, and portable to various make implementations. This release contains a bunch of new features and a bunch of bug fixes over previous versions. Highlights over 1.10, in no particular order: Optional Linux kernel style less verbose compile rules, faster rules for (un)install, support for parallel tests, colored tests output, improved Fortran and initial Vala support, threaded automake execution, lzma/xz compressed tarballs, man pages which are not transformed, non-".c" default sources, better AM_MAINTAINER_MODE, man pages for aclocal and automake. See the NEWS excerpt below for more details, and a couple of things to note when upgrading. The important changes of 1.11 over the last test release, 1.10b, are documented here: <http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/automake.git/tree/NEWS?id=7fa2890c4ec91ae20589eee67eef0be9bcbe159b> Further, the test release was released using GPLv3+, but the 1.11 release uses GPLv2+. Automake will again move to GPLv3+ once the Exception has been rewritten to use the new GPL Exception language. A big thanks to all people who have been testing pre-release, reporting bugs, contributing code, suggesting enhancements, and answering user questions on the mailing lists! You can find the new release here: ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.11.tar.gz ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.11.tar.gz.sig ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.11.tar.bz2 ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.11.tar.bz2.sig Soon it will also appear on the GNU mirrors which are listed here: http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html Finally, here are the MD5 checksums: 4db4efe027e26b33930a7e151de19d0f automake-1.11.tar.bz2 fab0bd2c3990a6679adaf9eeac0c6d2a automake-1.11.tar.gz Please report bugs by mail to <bug-automake@gnu.org>. New in 1.11: * Version requirements: - Autoconf 2.62 or greater is required. * Changes to aclocal: - The autoconf version check implemented by aclocal in aclocal.m4 (and new in Automake 1.10) is degraded to a warning. This helps in the common case where the Autoconf versions used are compatible. * Changes to automake: - The automake program can run multiple threads for creating most Makefile.in files concurrently, if at least Perl 5.7.2 is available with interpreter-based threads enabled. Set the environment variable AUTOMAKE_JOBS to the maximum number of threads to use, in order to enable this experimental feature. * Changes to Libtool support: - Libtool generic flags are now passed to the install and uninstall modes as well. - distcheck works with Libtool 2.x even when LT_OUTPUT is used, as config.lt is removed correctly now. * Languages changes: - subdir-object mode works now with Fortran (F77, FC, preprocessed Fortran, and Ratfor). - For files with extension .f90, .f95, .f03, or .f08, the flag $(FCFLAGS_f[09]x) computed by AC_FC_SRCEXT is now used in compile rules. - Files with extension .sx are also treated as preprocessed assembler. - The default source file extension (.c) can be overridden with AM_DEFAULT_SOURCE_EXT now. - Python 3.0 is supported now, Python releases prior to 2.0 are no longer supported. - AM_PATH_PYTHON honors python's idea about the site directory. - There is initial support for the Vala programming language, when using Vala 0.7.0 or later. * Miscellaneous changes: - Automake development is done in a git repository on Savannah now, see http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=automake.git A read-only CVS mirror is provided at cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@pserver.git.sv.gnu.org:/automake.git \ checkout -d automake HEAD - "make dist" can now create xz-compressed tarballs, as well as (deprecated?) lzma-compressed tarballs. - `automake --add-missing' will by default install the GPLv3 file as COPYING if it is missing. It will also warn that the license file should be added to source control. Note that Automake will never overwrite an existing COPYING file, even when the `--force-missing' option is used. - The manual is now distributed under the terms of the GNU FDL 1.3. - Automake ships and installs man pages for automake and aclocal now. - New shorthand `$(pkglibexecdir)' for `$(libexecdir)/@PACKAGE@'. - install-sh supports -C, which does not update the installed file (and its time stamps) if the contents did not change. - The `gnupload' script has been revamped. - The `depcomp' and `compile' scripts now work with MSVC under MSYS. - The targets `install' and `uninstall' are more efficient now, in that for example multiple files from one Automake variable such as `bin_SCRIPTS' are copied in one `install' (or `libtool --mode=install') invocation if they do not have to be renamed. Both install and uninstall may sometimes enter (`cd' into) the target installation directory now, when no build-local scripts are used. Both install and uninstall do not fail anymore but do nothing if an installation directory variable like `bindir' is set to the empty string. For built-in rules, `make install' now fails reliably if installation of a file failed. Conversely, `make uninstall' even succeeds when issued multiple times. These changes may need some adjustments from users: For example, some `install' programs refuse to install multiple copies of the same file in one invocation, so you may need to remove duplicate entries from file lists. Also, within one set of files, say, nobase_data_DATA, the order of installation may be changed, or even unstable among different hosts, due to the use of associative arrays in awk. The increased use of awk matches a similar move in Autoconf to provide for better scaling. Further, most undocumented per-rule install command variables such as binSCRIPT_INSTALL have been removed because they are not needed any more. Packages which use them should be using the appropriate one of INSTALL_{DATA,PROGRAM,SCRIPT} or their install_sh_{DATA,PROGRAM,SCRIPT} counterpart, depending on the type of files and the need for automatic target directory creation. - The "deleted header file problem" for *.m4 files is avoided by stub rules. This allows `make' to trigger a rerun of `aclocal' also if some previously needed macro file has been removed. - Rebuild rules now also work for a removed `subdir/Makefile.in' in an otherwise up to date tree. - The `color-tests' option causes colored test result output on terminals. - The `parallel-tests' option enables a new test driver that allows for parallel test execution, inter-test dependencies, lazy test execution for unit-testing, re-testing only failed tests, and formatted result output as RST (reStructuredText) and HTML. Enabling this option may require some changes to your test suite setup; see the manual for details. - The `silent-rules' option enables Linux kernel-style silent build output. This option requires the widely supported but non-POSIX `make' feature of recursive variable expansion, so do not use it if your package needs to build with `make' implementations that do not support it. To enable less verbose build output, the developer has to use the Automake option `silent-rules' in `AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE', or call the `AM_SILENT_RULES' macro. The user may then set the default verbosity by passing the `--enable-silent-rules' option to `configure'. At `make' run time, this default may be overridden using `make V=0' for less verbose, and `make V=1' for backward-compatible verbose output. - New prefix `notrans_' for manpages which should not be transformed by --program-transform. - New macro AM_COND_IF for conditional evaluation and conditional config files. - For AC_CONFIG_LINKS, if source and destination are equal, do not remove the file in a non-VPATH build. Such setups work with Autoconf 2.62 or newer. - AM_MAINTAINER_MODE now allows for an optional argument specifying the default setting. - AM_SUBST_NOTMAKE may prevent substitution of AC_SUBSTed variables, useful especially for multi-line values. - Automake's early configure-time sanity check now diagnoses an unsafe absolute source directory name and makes configure fail. - The Automake macros and rules cope better with whitespace in the current directory name, as long as the relative path to `configure' does not contain whitespace. To this end, the values of `$(MISSING)' and `$(install_sh)' may contain suitable quoting, and their expansion might need `eval'uation if used outside of a makefile. These undocumented variables may be used in several documented macros such as $(AUTOCONF) or $(MAKEINFO). Bugs fixed in 1.11: * Long standing bugs: - Fix aix dependency tracking for libtool objects. - Work around AIX sh quoting issue in AC_PROG_CC_C_O, leading to unnecessary use of the `compile' script. - For nobase_*_LTLIBRARIES with nonempty directory components, the correct `-rpath' argument is used now. - `config.status --file=Makefile depfiles' now also works with the extra quoting used internally by Autoconf 2.62 and newer (it used to work only without the `--file=' bit). - The `missing' script works better with versioned tool names. - Semantics for `missing help2man' have been revamped: Previously, if `help2man' was not present, `missing help2man' would have the following semantics: if some man page was out of date but present, then a warning would be printed, but the exit status was 0. If the man page was not present at all, then `missing' would create a replacement man page containing an error message, and exit with a status of 2. This does not play well with `make': the next run will see this particular man page as being up to date, and will only error out on the next generated man page, if any; repeat until all pages are done. This was not desirable. These are the new semantics: if some man page is not present, and help2man is not either, then `missing' will warn and generate the replacement page containing the error message, but exit successfully. However, `make dist' will ensure that no such bogus man pages are packaged into a tarball. - Targets provided by automake behave better with `make -n', in that they take care not to create files. - `config.status Makefile... depfiles' works fine again in the presence of disabled dependency tracking. - The default no-op recursive rules for these targets also work with BSD make now: html, install-html, install-dvi, install-pdf, install-pdf, install-info. - `make distcheck' works also when both a directory and some file below it have been added to a distribution variable, such as EXTRA_DIST or *_SOURCES. - Texinfo dvi, ps, pdf, and html output files are not removed upon `make mostlyclean' any more; only the LaTeX by-products are. - Renamed objects also work with the `subdir-objects' option and source file languages which Automake does not know itself. - `automake' now correctly complains about variable assignments which are preceded by a comment, extend over multiple lines with backslash-escaped newlines, and end in a comment sign. Previous versions would silently and wrongly ignore such assignments completely. * Bugs introduced by 1.10: - Fix output of dummy dependency files in presence of post-processed Makefile.in's again, but also cope with long lines. - $(EXEEXT) is automatically appended to filenames of XFAIL_TESTS that have been declared as programs in the same Makefile. This is for consistency with the analogous change to TESTS in 1.10. - Fix order of standard includes to again be `-I. -I$(srcdir)', followed by directories containing config headers. -- Prof. Roberto Bagnara Computer Science Group Department of Mathematics, University of Parma, Italy http://www.cs.unipr.it/~bagnara/ mailto:bagnara@cs.unipr.it