GNU Automake 1.19 is out, the first new release of the widely used build-system tool in 15 months. The GNU Automake project's NEWS file and Phoronix's report, both published September 10, 2026, describe a release built almost entirely around fixing existing bugs rather than adding new features.
Automake is a tool that generates portable Makefiles from a simpler template. It is one part of the GNU "autotools" chain, alongside Autoconf and Libtool. It remains common in C and C++ projects that have not switched to newer build systems like Meson or CMake. Older projects tend to stick with it, since switching would mean rewriting the entire build setup.
A 15-month gap between releases is long for a tool this widely depended on. Most of that time produced no visible change for users. Version 1.19 adds only one real feature. The rest of its changes fix bugs that had been sitting in the tracker, some for over a decade.
A 14-year-old bug, fixed
The release's headline fix addresses a problem that has existed for 14 years. Running two compression targets together, such as make dist-bzip2 dist-xz, used to fail. Automake 1.19 fixes this by having concurrent compression targets share intermediate tarballs through GNU make's .INTERMEDIATE mechanism, according to the project's NEWS file.
