Hi Alexandre et al., automake-1.7d is fine for me: I cannot find anything wrong with it.
However, there is an important change in behaviour that IMO should be mentioned in the NEWS file (or maybe even undone): While it was possible to add dependencies to automake targets in automake-1.7.x, such dependencies are now interpreted as *overriding* the automake definition. In usual Makefiles, when I write target: dependencies RULES then it overrides the original target definition if and only if the RULES section is nonempty. This is a pitfall for users: While the syntax of Makefile.am is the same as the syntax of Makefiles, writing a line like target: dependencies doesn't mean the same thing. To reproduce: $ mkdir testdir $ cd testdir $ cat > configure.ac <<EOF > AC_INIT > AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE(gettext-runtime, 0.12.2) > AC_CONFIG_FILES([Makefile]) > AC_OUTPUT > EOF $ cat > Makefile.am <<\EOF bin_SCRIPTS = foo install-exec-am: install-exec-clean install-exec-clean: rm -f $(bindir)/foo EOF $ touch foo NEWS README AUTHORS ChangeLog With automake-1.7.8: $ aclocal $ autoconf $ automake -a -c Makefile $ ./configure --prefix=/tmp/prefix $ make $ make -n install make install-exec-am install-data-am make[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/testdir' : /bin/sh ./../mkinstalldirs /tmp/prefix/bin list='foo'; for p in $list; do \ if test -f "$p"; then d=; else d="./"; fi; \ if test -f $d$p; then \ f=`echo "$p" | sed 's|^.*/||;s,x,x,'`; \ echo " /packages/gnu/bin/install -c $d$p /tmp/prefix/bin/$f"; \ /packages/gnu/bin/install -c $d$p /tmp/prefix/bin/$f; \ else :; fi; \ done rm -f /tmp/prefix/bin/foo make[1]: Für das Ziel »install-data-am« ist nichts zu tun. make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/testdir' With automake-1.7d: $ aclocal $ autoconf $ automake -a -c Makefile $ ./configure --prefix=/tmp/prefix $ make $ make -n install make install-exec-am install-data-am make[1]: Entering directory `/tmp/testdir' rm -f /tmp/prefix/bin/foo make[1]: Für das Ziel »install-data-am« ist nichts zu tun. make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/testdir' Bruno