Six years after the last release, Automake 1.17 has been published, a utility for automatically generating makefiles that comply with GNU coding standards. In this new version, the AM_PATH_PYTHON parameter has been changed to prioritize Python 3 over Python 2 when both branches are available on the system. Support has been added for versions of Python newer than 3.9. The py-compile script has dropped support for Python releases 0.x and 1.x, with the minimum version declared as Python 2.0, released in 2000.
Other significant changes in Automake 1.17 primarily relate to efforts to improve portability and fix accumulated bugs. For example:
- A new 'posix' option has been added for creating a special build target .POSIX for the make utility.
- Support for systems where the behavior of the 'rm -f' command does not comply with the POSIX specification has been added.
- The escaped sequence '\#' is now allowed in variables.
- The aclocal utility has been enhanced with the '--aclocal-path' flag to override the value of the $ACLOCAL_PATH variable.
- Support for autoreconf, autogen, and perl has been added to the missing script.
- The test-suite.log now includes key system information.
Source: opennet.ru
