GNU Automake 1.8.1 released

[Alexandre Duret-Lutz]

We're pleased to announce the release of Automake 1.8.1.

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 is a bug fix release.  The list of bug fixes is appended below.

You can find the new release here:

    ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.8.1.tar.gz
    ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.8.1.tar.gz.sig
    ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.8.1.tar.bz2
    ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.8.1.tar.bz2.sig
    ftp://sources.redhat.com/pub/automake/automake-1.8.1.tar.gz
    ftp://sources.redhat.com/pub/automake/automake-1.8.1.tar.gz.sig
    ftp://sources.redhat.com/pub/automake/automake-1.8.1.tar.bz2
    ftp://sources.redhat.com/pub/automake/automake-1.8.1.tar.bz2.sig

Soon it will also appear on the sources and GNU mirrors listed here:

    http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html
    http://sources.redhat.com/mirrors.html

Here are the MD5 checksums:

    860d9a10c0f151cabc4fe9484edef560  automake-1.8.1.tar.bz2
    666957c71b8e5d1cd3571a3cf415e420  automake-1.8.1.tar.gz

Please report bugs to <address@hidden>.

Bug fixed in 1.8.1:

* Bugs introduced by 1.8:

  - Fix Config.pm import error with old Perl versions (at least
    5.005_03).  One symptom is that aclocal could not find its macro
    directory.

  - Automake 1.8 used `mkdir -m 0755 -p --' to ensure that directories
    created by `make install' are always world readable, even if the
    installer happens to have an overly restrictive umask (e.g. 077).
    This was a mistake and has been reverted.  There are at least two
    reasons why we must not use `-m 0755':
      - it causes special bits like SGID to be ignored,
      - it may be too restrictive (some setups expect 775 directories).

  - Fix aclocal to honor definitions located in files which have been
    m4_included manually.  aclocal 1.8 had been updated to check
    m4_included files for new requirements, but forgot that these
    m4_included files can also provide new definitions.

    Note that if you have such a setup, we recommend you get rid of
    it.  In the past, there was a reason to m4_include files manually:
    aclocal used to duplicate entire M4 files into aclocal.m4, even
    files that were distributed.  Some packages were therefore
    m4_including the distributed file directly, and playing some
    tricks to ensure aclocal would not copy that file to aclocal.m4,
    in order to limit the amount of duplication.  Since aclocal 1.8.x
    will precisely output m4_includes for local M4 files, we recommend
    that you clean up your setup, removing all manual m4_includes and
    letting aclocal output them.

  - Output detailed menus in the Info version if the Automake manual,
    so that Emacs can locate the indexes.

  - configure.ac and configure were listed twice in DIST_COMMON (an
    internal variable where Automake lists configury files to
    distribute).  This was harmless, but unaesthetic.

  - Use `chmod a-w' instead of `chmod -w' as the latter honors umask.
    This was an issue only in the Automake package itself, not in
    its output.

  - Automake assumed that all AC_CONFIG_LINKS arguments had the form
    DEST:SRC.  This was wrong, as some packages do
    AC_CONFIG_LINKS($computedlinks).  This version no longer abort in
    that situation.

  - Contrary to mkinstalldirs, $(mkdir_p) was expecting exactly one
    argument.  This caused two kinds of failures:
      - Rules installing data in a conditionally defined directory
        failed when that directory was undefined.  In this case no
        argument was supplied.
      - `make installdirs' failed, because several directories were
        passed to $(mkdir_p).  This was an issue only on platform
        were $(mkdir_p) is implemented with `install-sh -d'.
    $(mkdir_p) as been changed to accept 0 or more arguments, as
    mkinstalldirs did.

* Long-standing bugs:

  - Fix an unexpected diagnostic occurring when users attempt
    to override some internal variables that Automake appends to.

  - aclocal now scans configure.ac for macro definitions (PR/319).

  - Fix a portability issue with OSF1/Tru64 Make.  If a directory
    distributes files which are outside itself (this usually occurs
    when using AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR([../dir]) to use auxiliary files
    from a parent package), then `make distcheck' fails due to an
    optimization performed by OSF1/Tru64 Make in its VPATH handling.
    (tests/subpkg2.test failure)

  - Fix another portability issue with Sun and OSF1/Tru64 Make.
    In a VPATH-build configuration, `make install' would install
    nobase_ files to wrong locations.

  - Fix a Perl `uninitialized value' diagnostic occurring when
    automake complains that a Texinfo file does not have a
    @setfilename statement.

  - Erase config.status.lineno during `make distclean'.  This file
    can be created by config.status.  Automake already knew about
    configure.lineno, but forgot config.status.lineno.

  - Distribute all files, even those which are built and installed
    conditionally.  This change affects files listed in conditionally
    defined *_HEADERS and *_PYTHON variable (unless they are nodist_*)
    as well as those listed in conditionally defined dist_*_DATA,
    dist_*_JAVA, dist_*_LISP, and dist_*_SCRIPTS variables.

  - Fix AM_PATH_LISPDIR to avoid \? in sed regular expressions; it
    doesn't conform to POSIX.

  - Normalize help strings for configure variables and options added
    by Automake macros.

* Anticipation:

  - Check for python2.4 in AM_PATH_PYTHON.

* Spurious failures in test suite:

  - tests/libtool5.test, tests/ltcond.test, tests/ltcond2.test,
    tests/ltconv.test: fix failures with CVS Libtool.
  - tests/aclocal6.test: fix failure if autom4te.cache is disabled.
  - tests/txinfo24.test, tests/txinfo25.test, tests/txinfo28.test:
    fix failures with old Texinfo versions.

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