GNU Automake 1.15 was released today as a bug-fix release and continued warning about Automake 2.0 breakage. The Automake 1.15 release comes one year after the development of this important GNU project has been on rather troubled ground.

Stefano Lattarini announced Automake 1.15 this morning and said, "This much-needed, bug-fixing release comes after a whole year of stalling and inactivity in the Automake development. It fixes several bugs (some recent, some long-standing) of minor and medium severity."

Among the bug-fixing that went on is for make distcheck sometimes failing to detect missing files from the distribution tarball, improvements in the install-sh script, and various other bugs have been squashed.

The Automake 1.15 announcement also warns of future backward incompatibilities coming wiht Automake 2.0. GNU Automake 2.0 will require Autoconf 2.70 or later, it will drop support for the configure.in name, it will drop support for some older platforms (such as SGI C/C++ compilers on IRIX), it will remove support for MS-DOS and Windows 95/98/ME, and Automake-provided scripts and Makefile recipes might finally start assuming a POSIX shell is present.

More details on the Automake 1.15 changes and the breakage coming whenever Automake 2.0 ends up getting released is outlined in the release announcement.