m4-1.4.20

[Bruce Dubbs]

New point version.

[Marty Jack]

Confirmed OK with gcc 15.

[Bruce Dubbs]

GNU M4 NEWS - User visible changes.

Noteworthy changes in release 1.4.20 (2025-05-10) [stable]

• Fix a bug in the `eval' builtin where it does not suppress warnings about division by zero that occurs within a more complex expression on the right hand side of || or && (present since short-circuiting was introduced in 1.4.8b).

• The syscmd' and esyscmd' builtins no longer mishandle a command line starting with -' or +' (present since "the beginning").

• Fix regression introduced in 1.4.19 where trace output (such as with `debugmode(t)') could read invalid memory when tracing a series of pushed macros that are popped during argument collection.

• Fix regression introduced in 1.4.19 where the `format' builtin inadvertently took on locale-dependent parsing and output of floating point numbers as a side-effect of introducing message translations. While it would be nice for m4 to be fully locale-aware, such a behavior change belongs in a major version release such as 1.6, and not a minor release.

• Fix regression introduced in 1.4.11 where the experimental `changeword' builtin could cause a crash if given a regex that does not match all one-byte prefixes of valid longer matches. As a reminder, `changeword' is not recommended for production use, and will likely not be present in the next major version release.

• On non-Unix platforms where binary files differ from text, loading a frozen file (which should be cross-platform compatible) now correctly uses binary mode.

• Several documentation improvements to the manual.

• Update to comply with newer C standards, and inherit portability improvements from gnulib.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Fixed at commit fd6944097.