GNU M4 1.4.4b released (beta release)

[Eric Blake]

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The GNU M4 Team is pleased to announce beta release 1.4.4b of GNU M4.

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/m4-1.4.4b.tar.gz    [474 kb]
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.4b.tar.bz2   [385 kb]

Here are the gpg detached signatures:

  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.4b.tar.gz.sig
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/m4/m4-1.4.4b.tar.bz2.sig

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

  gpg --verify m4-1.4.4b.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:

  2a8d58500739253a5f4024571b5442c8  m4-1.4.4b.tar.gz
  2279b9d9fa17c685a7809df4e7381ea8  m4-1.4.4b.tar.bz2
  713ea5b911801c2354093dc48c1fcf86449d92be  m4-1.4.4b.tar.gz
  52482ee5e5da2e35955b99f52371c78336d5aa4d  m4-1.4.4b.tar.bz2

This release solves several crashes that were present in all prior
releases of m4, and is the first release to use Automake and Gnulib for
additional build portability.  Due to the change in build infrastructure,
testing across a wide variety of platforms would be appreciated, with any
bug reports being sent to address@hidden  If nothing serious turns up,
then a stable release 1.4.5 will follow within a few weeks.

This release was bootstrapped with autoconf 2.59 and automake 1.9.6.

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_4b 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 1.4.4b: 17 June 2006

* Fix a recursive push_string crashing bug, which affected changequote of
  three or more characters on some compilers.
* Use automake to fix build portability issues.
* Fix a recursive m4wrap crashing bug.
* Fix a 1 in 2**32 hash crashing bug.
* Tracing a macro by name is now persistent, even if the macro is
  subsequently undefined or redefined.  The traceon and traceoff macros no
  longer warn about undefined symbols.  This solves a crash when using
  indir on an undefined macro traced with the -t option, as well as an
  incorrect result of ifdef.  Furthermore, tracing is no longer transferred
  with builtins, solving the bug of "m4 -tm4_eval" failing to give trace
  output on the input "define(`m4_eval',defn(`eval'))m4_eval(1)".
* Fix a crash when a macro is undefined while collecting its arguments, by
  always using the definition that was in effect before argument
  collection.  This behavior matches the C pre-processor, and means that
  the sequence "define(`f',`1')f(define(`f',`2'))f" is now documented to
  result in "12", rather than the previously undocumented "22".
* Update the regex engine to fix several bugs.
* Fix a potential crash on machines where char is signed.

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

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