Hello M4 users, GNU M4 1.4.18d has been released. This release is a minor update, and is marked beta in order to give translators the time to upload translations before the stable 1.4.19 is released later this month. The bulk of the changes since 1.4.18b have been marking additional strings for translation, and the bulk of the changes since the stable 1.4.18 have been portability fixes inherited from gnulib, since it has been more than four years since the last stable release.
GNU 'm4' is an implementation of the traditional Unix macro processor. It is mostly SVR4 compatible, although it has some extensions (for example, handling more than 9 positional parameters to macros). 'm4' also has built-in functions for including files, running shell commands, doing arithmetic, etc. Autoconf needs GNU 'm4' for generating 'configure' scripts, but not for running them. Here are the compressed sources: https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.18d.tar.gz (2.6MB) https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.18d.tar.bz2 (2.0MB) https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.18d.tar.xz (1.5MB) Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]: https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.18d.tar.gz.sig https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.18d.tar.bz2.sig https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.18d.tar.xz.sig Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth: https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html [*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this: gpg --verify m4-1.4.18d.tar.gz.sig If that command fails because you don't have the required public key, then run this command to import it: gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys A7A16B4A2527436A and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command. This release was bootstrapped with the following tools: Autoconf 2.69 Automake 1.16.2 Gnulib v0.1-4618-gc499a3c497 NEWS * Noteworthy changes in release 1.4.18d (2021-05-11) [beta] ** A number of portability improvements inherited from gnulib. -- Eric Blake, on behalf of the GNU M4 team