The release of the GNU Autoconf 2.72 package has been published, which provides a set of M4 macros for creating auto-configuration scripts for building applications on various Unix-like systems (based on the prepared template, the βconfigureβ script is generated).
The new version adds support for the future C language standard - C23, the publication of the final version of which is expected next year. Support has been discontinued for C compilers using pre-C89 (ANSI C) language variants that support only the old K&R (Kernighan and Ritchie) style function declaration syntax, which is no longer supported in the upcoming standard.
It now requires at least GNU M4 version 1.4.8 (GNU M4 1.4.16 recommended). At least Perl 5.10 is required to generate some of the Autoconf components used to develop Autoconf itself, but Perl 4 is sufficient to generate configure.ac files and M5.6 macros.
In addition, the new release implements checks to allow software developers to ensure that the system supports the time_t type, which is not subject to the year 2038 problem (on January 19, 2038, the epochal time counters specified by the 32-bit time_t type will overflow). Added "--enable-year2038" option and AC_SYS_YEAR2038 macro to enable the use of the 64-bit time_t type on 32-bit systems. Also added is the AC_SYS_YEAR2038_RECOMMENDED macro, which generates an error when using the 32-bit time_t type.
Source: opennet.ru