It’s been a few weeks already, but useful to know: on December 28th, Automake 1.13 has been released. Automake is an important tool in the embedded Linux space as many components use it as part of their build system, along with autoconf and libtool. For the better or the worse, some could say, but the autotools are still omnipresent, and for the embedded Linux developers, they have generally shown a pretty decent handling of cross-compilation issues.
This new release by itself doesn’t bring that many important changes, but it announces major changes that will occur at the next Automake release, 1.14. Quoting from the release e-mail:
* WARNING: Future backward-incompatibilities!
- Automake 1.14 will likely require Autoconf 2.70 or later (which is
still unreleased at the moment of writing, but is planned to be
released before Automake 1.14 is).
- Automake 1.14 will likely drop support for the long-deprecated
'configure.in' name for the Autoconf input file. You are advised
to use the recommended name 'configure.ac' instead.
- The long-obsolete (since automake 1.10) AM_PROG_MKDIR m4 macro will
be removed in Automake 1.14. The $(mkdir_p) make variable and the
@mkdir_p@ substitution will still remain available (as aliases of
$(MKDIR_P)) for the moment, for better backward compatibility; but
you are advised to stop using ASAP.
- The ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS special make variable will be fully deprecated
in Automake 1.14 (where it will raise warnings in the "obsolete"
category). You are advised to start relying on the new Automake
support for AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIRS instead (which is introduced with
this release; see below for more information).
[...]
- Support for the long-deprecated INCLUDES variable will be removed
altogether in Automake 1.14. The AM_CPPFLAGS variable should be
used instead.
These changes are quite likely to break a number of open-source components that haven’t followed the progressive changes in the automake world. For example, there is still a certain number of open-source components that use the configure.in file name, and some are also probably still using some of the constructs that will get removed in Automake 1.14.
It is therefore probably a good time to look around at the projects you’re maintaining, or that you’re using or contributing to, and check whether they will pass the Automake 1.14 step properly!