Automake 1.19, a utility for automatically generating makefiles that comply with the GNU coding standards, has been released.
In addition to bug fixes, the new version adds the autoconf macro AM_OPTIONAL_AUTOMAKE, which makes processing the specified "dist-XXX" options optional when running the "make dist" command. In practice, the new macro allows you to skip archive creation without error if the required compression utilities are missing from the system. For example, the "make dist" operation will not be aborted if dist-zip, dist-xz, and dist-zstd are specified in the settings, but the zip, xz, and zstd utilities are not found.
Source: opennet.ru
