Automake Looks To Drop MS-DOS, Windows 95/98/ME

Automake 1.13 was released on Friday with a number of major changes to this component of the GNU build system. With Automake 1.14, there's already a number of additional changes being considered.

Among the release highlights for GNU Automake 1.13 are:

- Elisp byte-compilation recipes have been overhauled, for better support of VPATH and subdir builds, and improved concurrency.

- Dropping support for Cygnus-style trees.

- The parallel test suite is now the default.

- Macro changes to AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR and AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIRS.

- Autoconf >= 2.65 and Texinfo >= 4.9 are now required.

For the next release, the major breakage in GNU Automake 1.14 is expected to be:

- Support for the IRIX and the SGI C/C++ code compilers will be removed. The IRIX and SGI compilers are now approaching seven years of age since their last update and SGI is planning to retire their support by the end of 2013.

- Dropping support for the deprecated "configure.in" support with being advised to use "configure.ac" files instead.

- Automake scripts and Makefile recipes might finally begin to assume that a POSIX shell is present.

- Automake developers are looking at removing support for MS-DOS and Windows 95/98/ME. This older Microsoft support was provided by DJGPP, a development suite that's a port of GCC and GNU utilities for DOS-compatible operating systems. While this support is looking to be removed, Cygwin and MSYS/MinGW will continue to be supported on modern versions of Microsoft Windows.

- Various other long-deprecated features will be removed.

More information on the GNU Automake 1.13 release is available from the mailing list announcement.