GNU Automake 1.16 Preps For More Changes Ahead Of Automake 2.0

While Meson+Ninja remains all the hype these days when it comes to open-source build systems, the GNU build system isn't going away any time soon and a key component of that was just updated, Automake 1.16.

GNU Automake 1.16 has fixes around its automatic dependency tracking, improvements around dealing with the reproducible builds effort, a custom test suite driver for the Guile Scheme SRFI-64 API, and various other minor changes.

Automake 1.16 is also warning about breakage that will occur with Automake 2.0. Among the changes for Automake 2.0 will be increasing the Autoconf dependency to v2.70+, dropping support for MS-DOS as well as removing Windows 95/98/ME support, Automake 2.0 might begin assuming a POSIX shell, and support is fading away for SGI C/C++ compilers on IRIX.

More details on GNU Automake 1.16 via the GNU release announcement.