automake-history: Timeline
1 Timeline
**********
1994-09-19 First CVS commit.
If we can trust the CVS repository, David J. MacKenzie (djm)
started working on Automake (or AutoMake, as it was spelt then)
this Monday.
The first version of the 'automake' script looks as follows.
#!/bin/sh
status=0
for makefile
do
if test ! -f ${makefile}.am; then
echo "automake: ${makefile}.am: No such honkin' file"
status=1
continue
fi
exec 4> ${makefile}.in
done
From this you can already see that Automake will be about reading
'*.am' file and producing '*.in' files. You cannot see anything
else, but if you also know that David is the one who created
Autoconf two years before you can guess the rest.
Several commits follow, and by the end of the day Automake is
reported to work for GNU fileutils and GNU m4.
The modus operandi is the one that is still used today: variable
assignments in 'Makefile.am' files trigger injections of precanned
'Makefile' fragments into the generated 'Makefile.in'. The use of
'Makefile' fragments was inspired by the 4.4BSD 'make' and include
files, however Automake aims to be portable and to conform to the
GNU standards for 'Makefile' variables and targets.
At this point, the most recent release of Autoconf is version 1.11,
and David is preparing to release Autoconf 2.0 in late October. As
a matter of fact, he will barely touch Automake after September.
1994-11-05 David MacKenzie's last commit.
At this point Automake is a 200 line portable shell script, plus
332 lines of 'Makefile' fragments. In the 'README', David states
his ambivalence between "portable shell" and "more appropriate
language":
I wrote it keeping in mind the possibility of it becoming an
Autoconf macro, so it would run at configure-time. That would
slow configuration down a bit, but allow users to modify the
Makefile.am without needing to fetch the AutoMake package.
And, the Makefile.in files wouldn't need to be distributed.
But all of AutoMake would. So I might reimplement AutoMake in
Perl, m4, or some other more appropriate language.
Automake is described as "an experimental Makefile generator".
There is no documentation. Adventurous users are referred to the
examples and patches needed to use Automake with GNU m4 1.3,
fileutils 3.9, time 1.6, and development versions of find and
indent.
These examples seem to have been lost. However at the time of
writing (10 years later in September, 2004) the FSF still
distributes a package that uses this version of Automake: check out
GNU termutils 2.0.
1995-11-12 Tom Tromey's first commit.
After one year of inactivity, Tom Tromey takes over the package.
Tom was working on GNU cpio back then, and doing this just for fun,
having trouble finding a project to contribute to. So while
hacking he wanted to bring the 'Makefile.in' up to GNU standards.
This was hard, and one day he saw Automake on
<ftp://alpha.gnu.org/>, grabbed it and tried it out.
Tom didn't talk to djm about it until later, just to make sure he
didn't mind if he made a release. He did a bunch of early releases
to the Gnits folks.
Gnits was (and still is) totally informal, just a few GNU friends
who François Pinard knew, who were all interested in making a
common infrastructure for GNU projects, and shared a similar
outlook on how to do it. So they were able to make some progress.
It came along with Autoconf and extensions thereof, and then
Automake from David and Tom (who were both gnitsians). One of
their ideas was to write a document paralleling the GNU standards,
that was more strict in some ways and more detailed. They never
finished the GNITS standards, but the ideas mostly made their way
into Automake.
1995-11-23 Automake 0.20
Besides introducing automatic dependency tracking (⇒Dependency
Tracking Evolution), this version also supplies a 9-page manual.
At this time 'aclocal' and 'AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE' did not exist, so
many things had to be done by hand. For instance, here is what a
configure.in (this is the former name of the 'configure.ac' we use
today) must contain in order to use Automake 0.20:
PACKAGE=cpio
VERSION=2.3.911
AC_DEFINE_UNQUOTED(PACKAGE, "$PACKAGE")
AC_DEFINE_UNQUOTED(VERSION, "$VERSION")
AC_SUBST(PACKAGE)
AC_SUBST(VERSION)
AC_ARG_PROGRAM
AC_PROG_INSTALL
(Today all of the above is achieved by 'AC_INIT' and
'AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE'.)
Here is how programs are specified in 'Makefile.am':
PROGRAMS = hello
hello_SOURCES = hello.c
This looks pretty much like what we do today, except the 'PROGRAMS'
variable has no directory prefix specifying where 'hello' should be
installed: all programs are installed in '$(bindir)'.
'LIBPROGRAMS' can be used to specify programs that must be built
but not installed (it is called 'noinst_PROGRAMS' nowadays).
Programs can be built conditionally using 'AC_SUBST'itutions:
PROGRAMS = @progs@
AM_PROGRAMS = foo bar baz
('AM_PROGRAMS' has since then been renamed to 'EXTRA_PROGRAMS'.)
Similarly scripts, static libraries, and data can be built and
installed using the 'LIBRARIES', 'SCRIPTS', and 'DATA' variables.
However 'LIBRARIES' were treated a bit specially in that Automake
did automatically supply the 'lib' and '.a' prefixes. Therefore to
build 'libcpio.a', one had to write
LIBRARIES = cpio
cpio_SOURCES = ...
Extra files to distribute must be listed in 'DIST_OTHER' (the
ancestor of 'EXTRA_DIST'). Also extra directories that are to be
distributed should appear in 'DIST_SUBDIRS', but the manual
describes this as a temporary ugly hack (today extra directories
should also be listed in 'EXTRA_DIST', and 'DIST_SUBDIRS' is used
for another purpose, ⇒Conditional Subdirectories
(automake)Conditional Subdirectories.).
1995-11-26 Automake 0.21
In less time than it takes to cook a frozen pizza, Tom rewrites
Automake using Perl. At this time Perl 5 is only one year old, and
Perl 4.036 is in use at many sites. Supporting several Perl
versions has been a source of problems through the whole history of
Automake.
If you never used Perl 4, imagine Perl 5 without objects, without
'my' variables (only dynamically scoped 'local' variables), without
function prototypes, with function calls that needs to be prefixed
with '&', etc. Traces of this old style can still be found in
today's 'automake'.
1995-11-28 Automake 0.22
1995-11-29 Automake 0.23
Bug fixes.
1995-12-08 Automake 0.24
1995-12-10 Automake 0.25
Releases are raining. 0.24 introduces the uniform naming scheme we
use today, i.e., 'bin_PROGRAMS' instead of 'PROGRAMS',
'noinst_LIBRARIES' instead of 'LIBLIBRARIES', etc. (However
'EXTRA_PROGRAMS' does not exist yet, 'AM_PROGRAMS' is still in use;
and 'TEXINFOS' and 'MANS' still have no directory prefixes.)
Adding support for prefixes like that was one of the major ideas in
'automake'; it has lasted pretty well.
AutoMake is renamed to Automake (Tom seems to recall it was
François Pinard's doing).
0.25 fixes a Perl 4 portability bug.
1995-12-18 Jim Meyering starts using Automake in GNU Textutils.
1995-12-31 François Pinard starts using Automake in GNU tar.
1996-01-03 Automake 0.26
1996-01-03 Automake 0.27
Of the many changes and suggestions sent by François Pinard and
included in 0.26, perhaps the most important is the advice that to
ease customization a user rule or variable definition should always
override an Automake rule or definition.
Gordon Matzigkeit and Jim Meyering are two other early contributors
that have been sending fixes.
0.27 fixes yet another Perl 4 portability bug.
1996-01-13 Automake 0.28
Automake starts scanning 'configure.in' for 'LIBOBJS' support.
This is an important step because until this version Automake only
knew about the 'Makefile.am's it processed. 'configure.in' was
Autoconf's world and the link between Autoconf and Automake had to
be done by the 'Makefile.am' author. For instance, if 'config.h'
was generated by 'configure', it was the package maintainer's
responsibility to define the 'CONFIG_HEADER' variable in each
'Makefile.am'.
Succeeding releases will rely more and more on scanning
'configure.in' to better automate the Autoconf integration.
0.28 also introduces the 'AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS' variable and the
'--gnu' and '--gnits' options, the latter being stricter.
1996-02-07 Automake 0.29
Thanks to 'configure.in' scanning, 'CONFIG_HEADER' is gone, and
rebuild rules for 'configure'-generated file are automatically
output.
'TEXINFOS' and 'MANS' converted to the uniform naming scheme.
1996-02-24 Automake 0.30
The test suite is born. It contains 9 tests. From now on test
cases will be added pretty regularly (⇒Releases), and this
proved to be really helpful later on.
'EXTRA_PROGRAMS' finally replaces 'AM_PROGRAMS'.
All the third-party Autoconf macros, written mostly by François
Pinard (and later Jim Meyering), are distributed in Automake's
hand-written 'aclocal.m4' file. Package maintainers are expected
to extract the necessary macros from this file. (In previous
versions you had to copy and paste them from the manual...)
1996-03-11 Automake 0.31
The test suite in 0.30 was run via a long 'check-local' rule. Upon
Ulrich Drepper's suggestion, 0.31 makes it an Automake rule output
whenever the 'TESTS' variable is defined.
'DIST_OTHER' is renamed to 'EXTRA_DIST', and the 'check_' prefix is
introduced. The syntax is now the same as today.
1996-03-15 Gordon Matzigkeit starts writing libtool.
1996-04-27 Automake 0.32
'-hook' targets are introduced; an idea from Dieter Baron.
'*.info' files, which were output in the build directory are now
built in the source directory, because they are distributed. It
seems these files like to move back and forth as that will happen
again in future versions.
1996-05-18 Automake 0.33
Gord Matzigkeit's main two contributions:
* very preliminary libtool support
* the distcheck rule
Although they were very basic at this point, these are probably
among the top features for Automake today.
Jim Meyering also provides the infamous 'jm_MAINTAINER_MODE', since
then renamed to 'AM_MAINTAINER_MODE' and abandoned by its author
(⇒maintainer-mode (automake)maintainer-mode.).
1996-05-28 Automake 1.0
After only six months of heavy development, the 'automake' script
is 3134 lines long, plus 973 lines of 'Makefile' fragments. The
package has 30 pages of documentation, and 38 test cases.
'aclocal.m4' contains 4 macros.
From now on and until version 1.4, new releases will occur at a
rate of about one a year. 1.1 did not exist, actually 1.1b to 1.1p
have been the name of beta releases for 1.2. This is the first
time Automake uses suffix letters to designate beta releases, a
habit that lasts.
1996-10-10 Kevin Dalley packages Automake 1.0 for Debian GNU/Linux.
1996-11-26 David J. MacKenzie releases Autoconf 2.12.
Between June and October, the Autoconf development is almost
stalled. Roland McGrath has been working at the beginning of the
year. David comes back in November to release 2.12, but he won't
touch Autoconf anymore after this year, and Autoconf then really
stagnates. The desolate Autoconf 'ChangeLog' for 1997 lists only 7
commits.
1997-02-28 <automake@gnu.ai.mit.edu> list alive
The mailing list is announced as follows:
I've created the "automake" mailing list. It is
"automake@gnu.ai.mit.edu". Administrivia, as always, to
automake-request@gnu.ai.mit.edu.
The charter of this list is discussion of automake, autoconf, and
other configuration/portability tools (e.g., libtool). It is expected
that discussion will range from pleas for help all the way up to
patches.
This list is archived on the FSF machines. Offhand I don't know if
you can get the archive without an account there.
This list is open to anybody who wants to join. Tell all your
friends!
-- Tom Tromey
Before that people were discussing Automake privately, on the Gnits
mailing list (which is not public either), and less frequently on
'gnu.misc.discuss'.
'gnu.ai.mit.edu' is now 'gnu.org', in case you never noticed. The
archives of the early years of the 'automake@gnu.org' list have
been lost, so today it is almost impossible to find traces of
discussions that occurred before 1999. This has been annoying more
than once, as such discussions can be useful to understand the
rationale behind a piece of uncommented code that was introduced
back then.
1997-06-22 Automake 1.2
Automake developments continues, and more and more new Autoconf
macros are required. Distributing them in 'aclocal.m4' and
requiring people to browse this file to extract the relevant macros
becomes uncomfortable. Ideally, some of them should be contributed
to Autoconf so that they can be used directly, however Autoconf is
currently inactive. Automake 1.2 consequently introduces 'aclocal'
('aclocal' was actually started on 1996-07-28), a tool that
automatically constructs an 'aclocal.m4' file from a repository of
third-party macros. Because Autoconf has stalled, Automake also
becomes a kind of repository for such third-party macros, even
macros completely unrelated to Automake (for instance macros that
fix broken Autoconf macros).
The 1.2 release contains 20 macros, including the
'AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE' macro that simplifies the creation of
'configure.in'.
Libtool is fully supported using '*_LTLIBRARIES'.
The missing script is introduced by François Pinard; it is meant to
be a better solution than 'AM_MAINTAINER_MODE' (⇒
maintainer-mode (automake)maintainer-mode.).
Conditionals support was implemented by Ian Lance Taylor. At the
time, Tom and Ian were working on an internal project at Cygnus.
They were using ILU, which is pretty similar to CORBA. They wanted
to integrate ILU into their build, which was all 'configure'-based,
and Ian thought that adding conditionals to 'automake' was simpler
than doing all the work in 'configure' (which was the standard at
the time). So this was actually funded by Cygnus.
This very useful but tricky feature will take a lot of time to
stabilize. (At the time this text is written, there are still
primaries that have not been updated to support conditional
definitions in Automake 1.9.)
The 'automake' script has almost doubled: 6089 lines of Perl, plus
1294 lines of 'Makefile' fragments.
1997-07-08 Gordon Matzigkeit releases Libtool 1.0.
1998-04-05 Automake 1.3
This is a small advance compared to 1.2. It adds support for
assembly, and preliminary support for Java.
Perl 5.004_04 is out, but fixes to support Perl 4 are still
regularly submitted whenever Automake breaks it.
1998-09-06 'sourceware.cygnus.com' is on-line.
Sourceware was setup by Jason Molenda to host open source projects.
1998-09-19 Automake CVS repository moved to 'sourceware.cygnus.com'
1998-10-26 'sourceware.cygnus.com' announces it hosts Automake:
Automake is now hosted on 'sourceware.cygnus.com'. It has a
publicly accessible CVS repository. This CVS repository is a copy
of the one Tom was using on his machine, which in turn is based on
a copy of the CVS repository of David MacKenzie. This is why we
still have to full source history. (Automake was on Sourceware
until 2007-10-29, when it moved to a git repository on
'savannah.gnu.org', but the Sourceware host had been renamed to
'sources.redhat.com'.)
The oldest file in the administrative directory of the CVS
repository that was created on Sourceware is dated 1998-09-19,
while the announcement that 'automake' and 'autoconf' had joined
'sourceware' was made on 1998-10-26. They were among the first
projects to be hosted there.
The heedful reader will have noticed Automake was exactly 4 years
old on 1998-09-19.
1999-01-05 Ben Elliston releases Autoconf 2.13.
1999-01-14 Automake 1.4
This release adds support for Fortran 77 and for the 'include'
statement. Also, '+=' assignments are introduced, but it is still
quite easy to fool Automake when mixing this with conditionals.
These two releases, Automake 1.4 and Autoconf 2.13 make a duo that
will be used together for years.
'automake' is 7228 lines, plus 1591 lines of Makefile fragment, 20
macros (some 1.3 macros were finally contributed back to Autoconf),
197 test cases, and 51 pages of documentation.
1999-03-27 The 'user-dep-branch' is created on the CVS repository.
This implements a new dependency tracking schemed that should be
able to handle automatic dependency tracking using any compiler
(not just gcc) and any make (not just GNU 'make'). In addition,
the new scheme should be more reliable than the old one, as
dependencies are generated on the end user's machine. Alexandre
Oliva creates depcomp for this purpose.
⇒Dependency Tracking Evolution, for more details about the
evolution of automatic dependency tracking in Automake.
1999-11-21 The 'user-dep-branch' is merged into the main trunk.
This was a huge problem since we also had patches going in on the
trunk. The merge took a long time and was very painful.
2000-05-10
Since September 1999 and until 2003, Akim Demaille will be
zealously revamping Autoconf.
I think the next release should be called "3.0".
Let's face it: you've basically rewritten autoconf.
Every weekend there are 30 new patches.
I don't see how we could call this "2.15" with a straight
face.
- Tom Tromey on <autoconf@gnu.org>
Actually Akim works like a submarine: he will pile up patches while
he works off-line during the weekend, and flush them in batch when
he resurfaces on Monday.
2001-01-24
On this Wednesday, Autoconf 2.49c, the last beta before Autoconf
2.50 is out, and Akim has to find something to do during his
week-end :)
2001-01-28
Akim sends a batch of 14 patches to <automake@gnu.org>.
Aiieeee! I was dreading the day that the Demaillator turned
his sights on automake... and now it has arrived! - Tom
Tromey
It's only the beginning: in two months he will send 192 patches.
Then he would slow down so Tom can catch up and review all this.
Initially Tom actually read all of these patches, then he probably
trustingly answered OK to most of them, and finally gave up and let
Akim apply whatever he wanted. There was no way to keep up with
that patch rate.
Anyway the patch below won't apply since it predates Akim's
sourcequake; I have yet to figure where the relevant passage
has been moved :) - Alexandre Duret-Lutz
All of these patches were sent to and discussed on
<automake@gnu.org>, so subscribed users were literally drowning in
technical mails. Eventually, the <automake-patches@gnu.org>
mailing list was created in May.
Year after year, Automake had drifted away from its initial design:
construct 'Makefile.in' by assembling various 'Makefile' fragments.
In 1.4, lots of 'Makefile' rules are being emitted at various
places in the 'automake' script itself; this does not help ensuring
a consistent treatment of these rules (for instance making sure
that user-defined rules override Automake's own rules). One of
Akim's goal was moving all of these hard-coded rules to separate
'Makefile' fragments, so the logic could be centralized in a
'Makefile' fragment processor.
Another significant contribution of Akim is the interface with the
"trace" feature of Autoconf. The way to scan 'configure.in' at
this time was to read the file and grep the various macro of
interest to Automake. Doing so could break in many unexpected
ways; 'automake' could miss some definition (for instance
'AC_SUBST([$1], [$2])' where the arguments are known only when M4
is run), or conversely it could detect some macro that was not
expanded (because it is called conditionally). In the CVS version
of Autoconf, Akim had implemented the '--trace' option, which
provides accurate information about where macros are actually
called and with what arguments. Akim will equip Automake with a
second 'configure.in' scanner that uses this '--trace' interface.
Since it was not sensible to drop the Autoconf 2.13 compatibility
yet, this experimental scanner was only used when an environment
variable was set, the traditional grep-scanner being still the
default.
2001-04-25 Gary V. Vaughan releases Libtool 1.4
It has been more than two years since Automake 1.4, CVS Automake
has suffered lot's of heavy changes and still is not ready for
release. Libtool 1.4 had to be distributed with a patch against
Automake 1.4.
2001-05-08 Automake 1.4-p1
2001-05-24 Automake 1.4-p2
Gary V. Vaughan, the principal Libtool maintainer, makes a "patch
release" of Automake:
The main purpose of this release is to have a stable automake
which is compatible with the latest stable libtool.
The release also contains obvious fixes for bugs in Automake 1.4,
some of which were reported almost monthly.
2001-05-21 Akim Demaille releases Autoconf 2.50
2001-06-07 Automake 1.4-p3
2001-06-10 Automake 1.4-p4
2001-07-15 Automake 1.4-p5
Gary continues his patch-release series. These also add support
for some new Autoconf 2.50 idioms. Essentially, Autoconf now
advocates 'configure.ac' over 'configure.in', and it introduces a
new syntax for 'AC_OUTPUT'ing files.
2001-08-23 Automake 1.5
A major and long-awaited release, that comes more than two years
after 1.4. It brings many changes, among which:
* The new dependency tracking scheme that uses 'depcomp'. Aside
from the improvement on the dependency tracking itself (⇒
Dependency Tracking Evolution), this also streamlines the
use of 'automake'-generated 'Makefile.in's as the
'Makefile.in's used during development are now the same as
those used in distributions. Before that the 'Makefile.in's
generated for maintainers required GNU 'make' and GCC, they
were different from the portable 'Makefile' generated for
distribution; this was causing some confusion.
* Support for per-target compilation flags.
* Support for reference to files in subdirectories in most
'Makefile.am' variables.
* Introduction of the 'dist_', 'nodist_', and 'nobase_'
prefixes.
* Perl 4 support is finally dropped.
1.5 did break several packages that worked with 1.4. Enough so
that Linux distributions could not easily install the new Automake
version without breaking many of the packages for which they had to
run 'automake'.
Some of these breakages were effectively bugs that would eventually
be fixed in the next release. However, a lot of damage was caused
by some changes made deliberately to render Automake stricter on
some setup we did consider bogus. For instance, 'make distcheck'
was improved to check that 'make uninstall' did remove all the
files 'make install' installed, that 'make distclean' did not omit
some file, and that a VPATH build would work even if the source
directory was read-only. Similarly, Automake now rejects multiple
definitions of the same variable (because that would mix very badly
with conditionals), and '+=' assignments with no previous
definition. Because these changes all occurred suddenly after 1.4
had been established for more than two years, it hurt users.
To make matter worse, meanwhile Autoconf (now at version 2.52) was
facing similar troubles, for similar reasons.
2002-03-05 Automake 1.6
This release introduced versioned installation (⇒API
Versioning (automake)API Versioning.). This was mainly pushed by
Havoc Pennington, taking the GNOME source tree as motive: due to
incompatibilities between the autotools it's impossible for the
GNOME packages to switch to Autoconf 2.53 and Automake 1.5 all at
once, so they are currently stuck with Autoconf 2.13 and Automake
1.4.
The idea was to call this version 'automake-1.6', call all its
bug-fix versions identically, and switch to 'automake-1.7' for the
next release that adds new features or changes some rules. This
scheme implies maintaining a bug-fix branch in addition to the
development trunk, which means more work from the maintainer, but
providing regular bug-fix releases proved to be really worthwhile.
Like 1.5, 1.6 also introduced a bunch of incompatibilities,
intentional or not. Perhaps the more annoying was the dependence
on the newly released Autoconf 2.53. Autoconf seemed to have
stabilized enough since its explosive 2.50 release and included
changes required to fix some bugs in Automake. In order to upgrade
to Automake 1.6, people now had to upgrade Autoconf too; for some
packages it was no picnic.
While versioned installation helped people to upgrade, it also
unfortunately allowed people not to upgrade. At the time of
writing, some Linux distributions are shipping packages for
Automake 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, and 1.9. Most of these still
install 1.4 by default. Some distribution also call 1.4 the
"stable" version, and present "1.9" as the development version;
this does not really makes sense since 1.9 is way more solid than
1.4. All this does not help the newcomer.
2002-04-11 Automake 1.6.1
1.6, and the upcoming 1.4-p6 release were the last release by Tom.
This one and those following will be handled by Alexandre
Duret-Lutz. Tom is still around, and will be there until about
1.7, but his interest into Automake is drifting away towards
projects like 'gcj'.
Alexandre has been using Automake since 2000, and started to
contribute mostly on Akim's incitement (Akim and Alexandre have
been working in the same room from 1999 to 2002). In 2001 and 2002
he had a lot of free time to enjoy hacking Automake.
2002-06-14 Automake 1.6.2
2002-07-28 Automake 1.6.3
2002-07-28 Automake 1.4-p6
Two releases on the same day. 1.6.3 is a bug-fix release.
Tom Tromey backported the versioned installation mechanism on the
1.4 branch, so that Automake 1.6.x and Automake 1.4-p6 could be
installed side by side. Another request from the GNOME folks.
2002-09-25 Automake 1.7
This release switches to the new 'configure.ac' scanner Akim was
experimenting in 1.5.
2002-10-16 Automake 1.7.1
2002-12-06 Automake 1.7.2
2003-02-20 Automake 1.7.3
2003-04-23 Automake 1.7.4
2003-05-18 Automake 1.7.5
2003-07-10 Automake 1.7.6
2003-09-07 Automake 1.7.7
2003-10-07 Automake 1.7.8
Many bug-fix releases. 1.7 lasted because the development version
(upcoming 1.8) was suffering some major internal revamping.
2003-10-26 Automake on screen
Episode 49, 'Repercussions', in the third season of the 'Alias' TV
show is first aired.
Marshall, one of the characters, is working on a computer virus
that he has to modify before it gets into the wrong hands or
something like that. The screenshots you see do not show any
program code, they show a 'Makefile.in' generated by automake...
2003-11-09 Automake 1.7.9
2003-12-10 Automake 1.8
The most striking update is probably that of 'aclocal'.
'aclocal' now uses 'm4_include' in the produced 'aclocal.m4' when
the included macros are already distributed with the package (an
idiom used in many packages), which reduces code duplication. Many
people liked that, but in fact this change was really introduced to
fix a bug in rebuild rules: 'Makefile.in' must be rebuilt whenever
a dependency of 'configure' changes, but all the 'm4' files
included in 'aclocal.m4' where unknown from 'automake'. Now
'automake' can just trace the 'm4_include's to discover the
dependencies.
'aclocal' also starts using the '--trace' Autoconf option in order
to discover used macros more accurately. This will turn out to be
very tricky (later releases will improve this) as people had
devised many ways to cope with the limitation of previous 'aclocal'
versions, notably using handwritten 'm4_include's: 'aclocal' must
make sure not to redefine a rule that is already included by such
statement.
Automake also has seen its guts rewritten. Although this rewriting
took a lot of efforts, it is only apparent to the users in that
some constructions previously disallowed by the implementation now
work nicely. Conditionals, Locations, Variable and Rule
definitions, Options: these items on which Automake works have been
rewritten as separate Perl modules, and documented.
2004-01-11 Automake 1.8.1
2004-01-12 Automake 1.8.2
2004-03-07 Automake 1.8.3
2004-04-25 Automake 1.8.4
2004-05-16 Automake 1.8.5
2004-07-28 Automake 1.9
This release tries to simplify the compilation rules it outputs to
reduce the size of the Makefile. The complaint initially come from
the libgcj developers. Their 'Makefile.in' generated with Automake
1.4 and custom build rules (1.4 did not support compiled Java) is
250KB. The one generated by 1.8 was over 9MB! 1.9 gets it down to
1.2MB.
Aside from this it contains mainly minor changes and bug-fixes.
2004-08-11 Automake 1.9.1
2004-09-19 Automake 1.9.2
Automake has ten years. This chapter of the manual was initially
written for this occasion.
2007-10-29 Automake repository moves to 'savannah.gnu.org'
and uses git as primary repository.
Info Catalog
automake-history: Top
automake-history: Top
automake-history: Dependency Tracking Evolution