Version 1.4.19-1 is the first release of GNU M4.

The xPack GNU M4 is a standalone cross-platform binary distribution of GNU M4.

There are separate binaries for macOS (Intel 64-bit, Apple Silicon 64-bit) and GNU/Linux (Intel 64-bit, Arm 32/64-bit).

Download

The binary files are available from GitHub Releases.

Prerequisites

  • GNU/Linux Intel 64-bit: any system with GLIBC 2.27 or higher (like Ubuntu 18 or later, Debian 10 or later, RedHat 8 later, Fedora 29 or later, etc)
  • GNU/Linux Arm 32/64-bit: any system with GLIBC 2.27 or higher (like Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu 18 or later, Debian 10 or later, RedHat 8 later, Fedora 29 or later, etc)
  • Intel macOS 64-bit: 10.13 or later
  • Apple Silicon macOS 64-bit: 11.6 or later

Install

The full details of installing the xPack GNU M4 on various platforms are presented in the separate Install page.

Easy install

The easiest way to install GNU M4 is with xpm by using the binary xPack, available as @xpack-dev-tools/m4 from the npmjs.com registry.

With the xpm tool available, installing the latest version of the package and adding it as a dependency for a project is quite easy:

cd my-project
xpm init # Only at first use.

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/m4@latest

ls -l xpacks/.bin

To install this specific version, use:

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/m4@1.4.19-1.1

It is also possible to install Meson Build globally, in the user home folder, but this requires xPack aware tools to automatically identify them and manage paths.

xpm install --global @xpack-dev-tools/m4@latest --verbose

Uninstall

To remove the links created by xpm in the current project:

cd my-project

xpm uninstall @xpack-dev-tools/m4

To completely remove the package from the central xPacks store:

xpm uninstall --global @xpack-dev-tools/m4

Compliance

The xPack GNU M4 generally follows the official GNU M4 releases.

The current version is based on:

  • GNU M4 version 1.4.19 from 2021-05-28.

Changes

Compared to the upstream version, there are no functional changes.

Bug fixes

  • none

Enhancements

  • none

Known problems

  • none

Shared libraries

On all platforms the packages are standalone, and expect only the standard runtime to be present on the host.

All dependencies that are build as shared libraries are copied locally in the libexec folder (or in the same folder as the executable for Windows).

DT_RPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH

On GNU/Linux the binaries are adjusted to use a relative path:

$ readelf -d library.so | grep runpath
 0x000000000000001d (RPATH)            Library rpath: [$ORIGIN]

In the GNU ld.so search strategy, the DT_RPATH has the highest priority, higher than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, so if this later one is set in the environment, it should not interfere with the xPack binaries.

Please note that previous versions, up to mid-2020, used DT_RUNPATH, which has a priority lower than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and does not tolerate setting it in the environment.

@rpath and @loader_path

Similarly, on macOS, the binaries are adjusted with install_name_tool to use a relative path.

Documentation

The original documentation is available online.

Build

The binaries for all supported platforms (Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux) were built using the xPack Build Box (XBB), a set of build environments based on slightly older distributions, that should be compatible with most recent systems.

The scripts used to build this distribution are in:

  • distro-info/scripts

For the prerequisites and more details on the build procedure, please see the README-MAINTAINER page.

CI tests

Before publishing, a set of simple tests were performed on an exhaustive set of platforms. The results are available from:

Tests

TBD

Checksums

The SHA-256 hashes for the files are:

356876be46079cc5768f0144210170bd9991f6651fbba930983fb160f92047e1
xpack-m4-1.4.19-1-darwin-arm64.tar.gz

31162614d87b873953590d68e51a7112e205edc11fbba1ee4b6fca296ff8da7d
xpack-m4-1.4.19-1-darwin-x64.tar.gz

88869ac3668ba24c82375fd027629e31fb045cc1c3d801d195d5e1947590910f
xpack-m4-1.4.19-1-linux-arm.tar.gz

e51ec78b5c28d30cfcaec166a63f5f510c7aed361c04662a1462afd70b6fbcf8
xpack-m4-1.4.19-1-linux-arm64.tar.gz

9f327c07506c5f620af13dd5009738560cb443feeabeac362947946b1f241d3d
xpack-m4-1.4.19-1-linux-x64.tar.gz

Deprecation notices

32-bit support

Support for 32-bit Intel Linux and Intel Windows was dropped in 2022. Support for 32-bit Arm Linux (armv7l) will be preserved for a while, due to the large user base of 32-bit Raspberry Pi systems.

Linux minimum requirements

Support for RedHat 7 was dropped in 2022 and the minimum requirement was raised to GLIBC 2.27, available starting with Ubuntu 18, Debian 10 and RedHat 8.

Download analytics

Credit to Shields IO for the badges and to Somsubhra/github-release-stats for the individual file counters.