For those continuing to use GNU Automake over the likes of Meson or CMake for your build system, Automake 1.19 is out today as the first new release in 15 months. Among the many fixes in this release is for a bug dating back 14 years.

While more than one year has passed since Automake 1.18.1 as the last release, there is just one new feature with Automake 1.19: AM_OPTIONAL_AUTOMAKE . The AM_OPTIONAL_AUTOMAKE autoconf macro allows a list like dist-xz, dist-zstd, dist-bzip3, and others. In turn it will build each archive if the given tool for archive creation/compression is available and skip the ones otherwise without erroring out.

On the bug fixes side, Automake 1.19 will now recognize files COPYINGv2, COPYINGv3, and similar and treat them like the conventional COPYING file for distributing automatically in the archive. This is intended to help with compatibility for other GNU projects like GNU GMP files.

With Automake 1.19, the make dist-bzip2 dist-xz command will now work as previously the uncompressed tarball was removed after the first goal while now it will be properly shared and used for both the XZ and Bzip2 archive creation. This addresses [1]this 14 year old bug report for Automake over that command failing.

Automake 1.19 also now better detects BusyBox's Tar, make dist will now logically fail when Tar fails rather than succeeding with a truncated archive, and various other fixes.

GNU Automake 1.19 is available from [2]savannah.gnu.org .



[1] https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=10975

[2] https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/automake.git/tag/?h=v1.19