GNU Automake 1.16.2 Released With Zstd Support

GNU Automake 1.16.2 is out this weekend as the first update to this important piece of the GNU build system in two years. While such length of time has passed, Automake 1.16.2 is only made up of just over three dozen commits.

Of the 38 commits making up Automake 1.16.2, there are mostly bug fixes along with one new feature. The new feature to Automake 1.16.2 is Zstd support.

The Zstd support yields the dist-zstd option for generating a tar archive of the distribution using Zstd compression. When opting for creating the .tar.zst package, a compression level of 19 is used by default. This Zstd compression support for the source package of the program employing Automake is an alternative to its Zip/TarZ/Bzip2/LZip archive creation options already supported.

That's about it for Automake 1.16.2. The bug fixes are also outlined in the release announcement.