As discussed in the thread starting at <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-autoconf/2026-01/msg00008.html> we would like to do an Autoconf 2.73 release in the relatively near future.
I have re-triaged all the bugs in Savannah. I didn't find anything that looked like a blocker for the release, but I did find four bugs that look low-risk and easy to address, three of them with patches attached. I'll test those patches and merge the changes later this week, and on Monday I'll put out a beta test release. I would like to ask folks to look through the mailing list backlog and see if there are any high-priority and/or low-risk issues that didn't make it into the bug tracker; I do not have time to do this myself. If you are able to test-build your favorite packages using git trunk, please also go ahead and do that. I want to give the beta at least a couple weeks to cook, so I'm tentatively saying a 2.73 release should happen near the end of February. In the same thread, it was suggested that we _also_ put out a 2.72.1 with just the most high-priority fix (a C++ compatibility issue). I do not have time to do that. If someone would like to step up and be release manager for 2.72.x hotfix releases, though, I can walk you through the process. zw
