Autoconf test version 2.61a released

[Paul Eggert]

We're happy to announce the release of Autoconf 2.61a.  This is a test
version, meant to shake out bugs in our switch from 'sed' to 'awk' to
implement 'configure'-time substitutions, and (if 'printf' is
available) from 'echo' to 'printf' to output strings containing
special characters.  There is also one important bug fix and one
obsoleted macro.  The important changes since Autoconf 2.61 are listed
in more detail below.

The sources and GPG detached signature are here:

ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.61a.tar.gz
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.61a.tar.gz.sig
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.61a.tar.bz2
ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.61a.tar.bz2.sig

Here are the MD5 and SHA-512 checksums:

69e927100759224398b8cd3f5eb40b20  autoconf-2.61a.tar.gz
adcbe3a2031c60413dfaab00897e4d83  autoconf-2.61a.tar.bz2
d96d8ef6d026f2909a326027c4d1b8debfde77671d243abf7e7b59f306a37957a4c8f1da021f6e20f837efec51d4bac0fb80c3780ed32866c169fa3ae103f2c3
  autoconf-2.61a.tar.gz
74b9427065582db4676f6165f213c810990486e9e1e2d4b285528aa6ec883ab493b23694a97fd4ff361b2492e565fa243907f15d9283cbc0bff7d4ba9e8b44af
  autoconf-2.61a.tar.bz2

I'd like to thank the other major contributors to this test release,
who are Ralf Wildenhues, Stepan Kasal, and Eric Blake.

NEWS:

** AC_FUNC_FSEEKO was broken in 2.61; it didn't make fseeko and ftello visible
   on many platforms.  This has been fixed.

** AC_FUNC_SETVBUF_REVERSED is now obsolete.  It is still defined for backward
   compatibility but it does nothing.  The macro was already
   obsolescent, as the last systems to have the problem were those
   based on SVR2, which became obsolete in 1987.  The macro had bugs
   on some modern systems and could no longer be maintained reliably
   due to lack of ancient systems to test it on.

** config.status now uses awk instead of sed for most substitutions, for speed.

   - As a side effect multi-line values of substituted variables no
     longer have a small limit in total size, though for portability
     each line should not exceed the POSIX length limit for text lines.

   - It is now documented that Makefile.in should not contain
     overlapping variable occurrences, e.g., @address@hidden@.
     Autoconf's behavior was always iffy in such cases, and the
     awk implementation has changed the behavior.

** Many uses of 'echo' have been rewritten so that Autoconf-generated
   scripts have fewer problems with strings or file names containing
   embedded special characters such as backslash or leading "-".  This
   was implemented by using `printf '%s\n' "$foo"' instead of `echo
   "$foo"' when printf works.  Due to the implementation technique
   used, Autoconf-generated scripts now run considerably more slowly
   on ancient implementations lacking printf.  However, this should
   not be a problem, since Autoconf-generated scripts in practice
   invariably find a more-modern shell these days.