We are pleased to announce that we are now moving towards the next release. We intend for it to contain primarily bug fixes and various documentation adjustments. Nonetheless, a new feature will be introduced per Bug #81040:
- New autoconf macro AM_OPTIONAL_AUTOMAKE. It takes a list of
`dist-XXX' option names (dist-bzip2, dist-bzip3, dist-xz,
dist-lzip, dist-zstd, dist-zip, dist-shar, dist-tarZ);
`make dist' builds each archive when its tool is available and skips
it otherwise, without making `make dist' fail. This is for
systems that intentionally lack some compression tools.
We intend to keep it invariant that invoking AM_OPTIONAL_AUTOMAKE in an
autotools project does not break builds due to missing software, unmet
criteria and other foreseeable issues. Moreover, the long-standing Bug
#19614 was fixed:
tar was piped into the compressor, and a pipeline reports only its
last exit status, so a failing tar left a truncated archive behind
and `make dist' still exited 0. `pipefail' is not portable, so tar
now writes $(distdir).tar and each dist-* target compresses that.
One tar run per `make dist' instead of one per format, at the price
of room for the uncompressed tarball.
As this is my first release in this capacity, I should further take the
opportunity to introduce myself as a new maintainer of Automake. I am a
research assistant and university instructor, working primarily in
molecular genomics and data compression. At present, I am fortunate to
have spare capacity which I intend to devote to Automake, in particular
primarily to reviewing and merging patches, responding to bug reports,
and working through the existing backlog.
We invite further suggestions for defects that should be prioritised for
resolution before the upcoming release.
--
With Valediction,
Kamila Szewczyk (https://iczelia.net)
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