GNU M4 1.4.9b released (beta release)

[Eric Blake]

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The GNU M4 Team is pleased to announce beta release 1.4.9b of GNU M4.  If
all goes well with this version, it is anticipated that a stable release
of M4 1.4.10 will be made soon.

GNU `m4' is an implementation of the traditional Unix macro processor. It
is mostly SVR4 compatible, although it has some extensions (for example,
handling more than 9 positional parameters to macros).  `m4' also has
built-in functions for including files, running shell commands, doing
arithmetic, etc.  Autoconf needs GNU `m4' for generating `configure'
scripts, but not for running them.

Here are the compressed sources:

  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.9b.tar.gz    [864 kB]
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.9b.tar.bz2   [698 kB]

Here are the gpg detached signatures:

  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.9b.tar.gz.sig
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.9b.tar.bz2.sig

You should download the signature named after any tarball you download,
and then verify its integrity with, for example:

  gpg --verify m4-1.4.9b.tar.gz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key, then
run this command to import it:

  gpg --keyserver wwwkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys F4850180

Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums:

  049a761d4f528db2ddd85195eb7974cc  m4-1.4.9b.tar.gz
  cc7dc662a8a0f83e5993e2e837598182  m4-1.4.9b.tar.bz2
  8b0cd66299538179eb174d43d9df2872448f5961  m4-1.4.9b.tar.gz
  a8b67bacb02d294ad13ccd8224c888eff233af85  m4-1.4.9b.tar.bz2

This release fixes two regressions in previous releases, and pulls in more
of the gnulib project in order to make program behavior more predictable
even on platforms that do not conform to the latest standards.  There are
known porting issues on some platforms, such as MingW; this beta release
is offered as a chance to iron out these issues before formally releasing
M4 1.4.10.  It is recommended that you run the testsuite with 'make -k
check' and report all failures on your platform to address@hidden, if you
would like the porting issues resolved.

This release was bootstrapped with a gnulib checkout from 29 May 2007, and
with stock Autoconf 2.61 and Automake 1.10.

Alternatively, you can fetch the unbootstrapped sourcecode from anonymous
cvs by using the following commands:

  $ export CVS_RSH=ssh
  $ cvs -z3 -d :pserver:address@hidden:/sources/m4 \
  co -r release_1.4.9b m4

You will then need to have recent versions of Automake and Autoconf
installed, and a recent checkout of gnulib, in order to bootstrap the
checked out sources yourself.

New in 1.4.9b: 29 May 20007

  * Fix regression introduced in 1.4.9 in the `eval' builtin when
performing division.
  * Fix regression introduced in 1.4.8 in the `-F' option that made it
impossible to freeze more than 512 kibibytes of diverted text.
  * The synclines option `-s' no longer generates sync lines in the middle
of multiline comments or quoted strings.
  * Work around a number of corner-case POSIX compliance bugs in various
broken stdio libraries.  In particular, the `syscmd' builtin behaves more
predictably when stdin is seekable.
  * The `format' builtin now understands formats such as %a, %A, and
%'hhd, and works around a number of platform printf bugs.  Furthermore,
the sequence format(%*.*d,-1,-1,1) no longer outputs random data.
  * The testsuite is improved to also run gnulib portability tests for the
features that M4 imports from gnulib.

Please report bugs to <address@hidden>, along with the output of 'make
check' and any other information that might be useful in resolving the issue.

- --
Eric Blake
The GNU M4 team
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