GNU Automake 1.14.1 released

[Stefano Lattarini]

We are pleased to announce the GNU Automake 1.14.1 maintenance release.

This is a bug-fixing release, fixing few minor bugs, one compatibility
problem with perl 5.18 and later, and some spurious testsuite failures.

See below for the detailed list of changes since the previous version,
as summarized by the NEWS file.

Download here:

  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.14.1.tar.gz
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.14.1.tar.xz

Please report bugs and problems to <address@hidden>,
and send general comments and feedback to <address@hidden>.

Thanks to everyone who has reported problems, contributed
patches, and helped testing Automake!

-*-*-*-

* WARNING: Future backward-incompatibilities!

  - Makefile recipes generated by Automake 2.0 will expect to use an
    'rm' program that doesn't complain when called without any non-option
    argument if the '-f' option is given (so that commands like "rm -f"
    and "rm -rf" will act as a no-op, instead of raising usage errors).
    This behavior of 'rm' is very widespread in the wild, and it will be
    required in the next POSIX version:

      <http://austingroupbugs.net/view.php?id=542>

    Accordingly, AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE now expands some shell code that checks
    that the default 'rm' program in PATH satisfies this requirement,
    aborting the configure process if this is not the case.  For the
    moment, it's still possible to force the configuration process to
    succeed even with a broken 'rm', that that will no longer be the case
    for Automake 2.0.

  - Automake 2.0 will require Autoconf 2.70 or later (which is still
    unreleased at the moment of writing, but is planned to be released
    before Automake 2.0 is).

  - Automake 2.0 will drop support for the long-deprecated 'configure.in'
    name for the Autoconf input file.  You are advised to start using the
    recommended name 'configure.ac' instead, ASAP.

  - The ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS special make variable will be fully deprecated in
    Automake 2.0: it will raise warnings in the "obsolete" category (but
    still no hard error of course, for compatibilities with the many, many
    packages that still relies on that variable).  You are advised to
    start relying on the new Automake support for AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIRS
    instead (which was introduced in Automake 1.13).

  - Automake 2.0 will remove support for automatic dependency tracking
    with the SGI C/C++ compilers on IRIX.  The SGI depmode has been
    reported broken "in the wild" already, and we don't think investing
    time in debugging and fixing is worthwhile, especially considering
    that SGI has last updated those compilers in 2006, and is expected
    to retire support for them in December 2013:
    <http://www.sgi.com/services/support/irix_mips_support.html>

  - Automake 2.0 will remove support for MS-DOS and Windows 95/98/ME
    (support for them was offered by relying on the DJGPP project).
    Note however that both Cygwin and MSYS/MinGW on modern Windows
    versions will continue to be fully supported.

  - Automake-provided scripts and makefile recipes might (finally!)
    start assuming a POSIX shell in Automake 2.0.  There still is no
    certainty about this though: we'd first like to wait and see
    whether future Autoconf versions will be enhanced to guarantee
    that such a shell is always found and provided by the checks in
    ./configure.

  - Starting from Automake 2.0, third-party m4 files located in the
    system-wide aclocal directory, as well as in any directory listed
    in the ACLOCAL_PATH environment variable, will take precedence
    over "built-in" Automake macros.  For example (assuming Automake
    is installed in the /usr/local hierarchy), a definition of the
    AM_PROG_VALAC macro found in '/usr/local/share/aclocal/my-vala.m4'
    should take precedence over the same-named automake-provided macro
    (defined in '/usr/local/share/aclocal-2.0/vala.m4').

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New in 1.14.1:

* Bugs fixed:

  - The user is no longer allowed to override the --srcdir nor the --prefix
    configure options used by "make distcheck" (bug#14991).

  - Fixed a gross inefficiency in the recipes for installing byte-compiled
    python files, that was causing an O(N^2) performance on the number N of
    files, instead of the expected O(N) performance.  Note that this bug
    was only relevant when the number of python files was high (which is
    unusual in practice).

  - Automake try to offer a more reproducible output for warning messages,
    in the face of the newly-introduced randomization for hash keys order
    in Perl 5.18.

  - The 'test-driver' script now actually error out with a clear error
    message on the most common invalid usages.

  - Several spurious failures/hangs in the testsuite (bugs #14706, #14707,
    #14760, #14911, #15181, #15237).

* Documentation fixes:

  - Fixed typos in the 'fix-timestamp.sh' example script that made it
    nonsensical.

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