automake-1.18

[Bruce Dubbs]

New minor version.

[Bruce Dubbs]

New in 1.18 (2025-05-25):

New features added

• Default tar format is now ustar, mainly to support longer filenames; the tar-v7 and other explicit options to force a particular tar format are unchanged and still override the default.

• The mdate-sh auxiliary script generally used with Texinfo now uses SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, if set, instead of the source file's mtime.

• New option dist-bzip3 for bzip3 compression of distributions.

• New option --stderr-prefix for tap-driver.sh, to prefix each line of stderr from a test script with a given string.

• Support for Algol 68 added, based on the GNU Algol 68 compiler.

Bugs fixed

• Do not make Perl warnings fatal, per Perl's recommendation.

• Avoid Perl 5.41.8+ precedence warning for use of !!.

• a Perl path containing whitespace now emits a warning instead of an error, so ./configure PERL='/usr/bin/env perl' can work.

• The py-compile script once again does nothing (successfully) if the PYTHON environment variable is set to ":", or anything that isn't a Python interpreter (according to $PYTHON -V). Exception: if PYTHON is set to "false", do nothing but exit unsuccessfully, also to match previous behavior.

• The no-dist-built-sources Automake option now operates (hopefully) as intended, i.e., omits the dependency on $(BUILT_SOURCES) for the distdir target.

• Only warn about install.sh being found, instead of it being a fatal error.

• The compile script is more robust to Windows configurations; specifically, avoids double-path translation on MSYS.

• The test infrastructure sets the CONFIG_SITE environment variable to /dev/null, to avoid the local system's Autoconf site defaults from breaking the test environment.

• AM_SILENT_RULES once again always ends with a newline.

• AM_SANITY_CHECK now outputs "no" on failure, so that a complete line is written to stdout before the error message is written to stderr.

Miscellaneous changes

• Only require the presence of an ABOUT-NLS file at the 'gnits' strictness level.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Fixed in trunk from the gcc15 branch.