[ANNOUNCEMENT] gawk 5.2.1-1

Corinna Vinschen via Cygwin-announce cygwin-announce@cygwin.com
Wed Nov 23 11:24:07 GMT 2022


The following packages have been uploaded to the Cygwin distribution:

* gawk-5.2.1-1

The gawk package contains the GNU version of awk, a text
processing utility. Awk interprets a special-purpose programming
language to do quick and easy text pattern matching and
reformatting jobs.

Install the gawk package if you need a text processing utility.
Gawk is considered to be a standard Linux tool for processing text.

Changes from 5.2.0 to 5.2.1
---------------------------

1. More subtle issues with untyped array elements being passed to
   functions have been fixed. 

2. The rwarray extension's readall() function has had some bugs fixed.

3. The PMA allocator is now supported on Linux on s/390, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
   It is currently disabled on macos on M1 since there are some unsolved
   problems in that environment. macos on Intel works without problem.

4. There have been several minor code cleanups and bug fixes. See the
   ChangeLog for details.

Changes from 5.1.x to 5.2.0
---------------------------

*****************************************************************************
* MPFR mode (the -M option) is now ON PAROLE.  This feature is now being    *
* supported by a volunteer in the development team and not by the primary   *
* maintainer.  If this situation changes, then the feature will be removed. *
* For more information see this section in the manual:                      *
* https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/MPFR-On-Parole.html    *
*****************************************************************************

1. Infrastructure upgrades: Libtool 2.4.7, Bison 3.8.2.

2. Numeric scalars now compare in the same way as C for the relational
   operators. Comparison order for sorting has not changed.  This only
   makes a difference when comparing Infinity and NaN values with
   regular numbers; it should not be noticeable most of the time.

3. If the AWK_HASH environment variable is set to "fnv1a" gawk will
   use the FNV1-A hash function for associative arrays.

4. The CMake infrastructure has been removed. In the five years it was in
   the tree, nobody used it, and it was not updated.

5. There is now a new function, mkbool(), that creates Boolean-typed
   values.  These values *are* numbers, but they are also tagged as
   Boolean. This is mainly for use with data exchange to/from languages
   or environments that support real Boolean values. See the manual
   for details.

6. As BWK awk has supported interval expressions since 2019, they are
   now enabled even if --traditional is supplied. The -r/--re-interval option
   remains, but it does nothing.

7. The rwarray extension has two new functions, writeall() and readall(),
   for saving / restoring all of gawk's variables and arrays.

8. The new `gawkbug' script should be used for reporting bugs.

9. The manual page (doc/gawk.1) has been considerably reduced in size.
   Wherever possible, details were replaced with references to the online
   copy of the manual.

10. Gawk now supports Terence Kelly's "persistent malloc" (pma),
    allowing gawk to preserve its variables, arrays and user-defined
    functions between runs. THIS IS AN EXPERIMENTAL FEATURE!

    For more information, see the manual. A new pm-gawk.1 man page
    is included, as is a separate user manual that focuses on the feature.

11. Support for OS/2 has been removed. It was not being actively
    maintained.

12. Similarly, support for DJGPP has been removed. It also was not
    being actively maintained.

13. VAX/VMS is no longer supported, as it can no longer be tested.
    The files for it remain in the distribution but will be removed
    eventually.

14. Some subtle issues with untyped array elements being passed to
    functions have been fixed.

15. Syntax errors are now immediately fatal. This prevents problems
    with errors from fuzzers and other such things.

16. There have been numerous minor code cleanups and bug fixes. See the
    ChangeLog for details.



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