X.Org package wrangler Alan Coopersmith at Oracle announced today the release of imake 1.0.11, the newest version of this utility that 20+ years ago was used extensively as part of the X Window System build process for generating Makefiles from a template. With this first imake point release in two years, imake itself can now be built via Meson and there is now support for RISC-V and LoongArch architectures.
Over the past twenty years the still-active X11 / X Window System code has transitioned largely over to GNU Autoconf and Automake while in more recent years seeing increased Meson adoption too. But for any old X code remnants not yet adapted or wanting to build older versions of said software, imake is still needed.
Alan Coopersmith wrote in today’s imake 1.0.11 announcement:
“The imake package contains the imake utility, plus a number of support programs, such as mkdirhier, revpath, and xmkmf.
The X Window System used imake extensively up through the X11R6.9 release, for both full builds within the source tree and external software. X moved to GNU autoconf and automake for its build system in 2005 (*20 years ago*) for X11R7.0 and later releases, and is now in the process of moving to meson. For now, we still provide imake for building existing external software programs that have not yet converted to another build system, though we are not actively maintaining it for new OS or platform releases.
Anyone shipping software still using imake to build should be working on moving to something that is still adding support for new platforms and runtimes.
This release adds user-contributed support for Linux on RISC-V & LoongArch platforms.”
Besides adding Linux RISC-V and LoongArch architecture support, imake 1,0.11 also adds an option to build with the modern Meson build system for imake. Plus man page updates and a few fixes collected over the past two years.
