GNU M4 1.4.19 has been released. This stable release is a minor update, collecting several years of portability improvements, as well as a couple of minor optimizations to performance. Notable improvements in this release include translations of output in various languages, and better stack overflow detection on several systems that previously required the use of GNU libsigsegv.
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: https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/m4/m4-1.4.19.tar.gz (2.9MB) https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/m4/m4-1.4.19.tar.bz2 (2.1MB) https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/m4/m4-1.4.19.tar.xz (1.6MB) Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]: https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/m4/m4-1.4.19.tar.gz.sig https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/m4/m4-1.4.19.tar.bz2.sig https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/m4/m4-1.4.19.tar.xz.sig Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth: https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html [*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this: gpg --verify m4-1.4.19.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 keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys A7A16B4A2527436A and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command. This release was bootstrapped with the following tools: Autoconf 2.71 Automake 1.16.3 Gnulib v0.1-4645-g3639c57a97 NEWS * Noteworthy changes in release 1.4.19 (2021-05-28) [stable] ** A number of portability improvements inherited from gnulib, including the ability to perform stack overflow detection on more platforms without linking to GNU libsigsegv. * Noteworthy changes in release 1.4.18d (2021-05-11) [beta] ** A number of portability improvements inherited from gnulib. * Noteworthy changes in release 1.4.18b (2021-05-07) [beta] ** The symbol hash table now defaults to 65537 buckets instead of 509, as modern systems have enough memory to benefit from fewer hash collisions by default. ** Introduce the use of gettext, with the immediate benefit of nicer UTF-8 author names. Over time, more translations of program messages will become available. ** A number of portability improvements inherited from gnulib. -- Eric Blake, on behalf of GNU M4 -- If you have a working or partly working program that you'd like to offer to the GNU project as a GNU package, see https://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.