Beta release of GNU Awk 5.2.2

[Aharon Robbins]

This note is to announce the BETA release of GNU Awk 5.2.2.

It is available from:

        http://www.skeeve.com/gawk/gawk-5.2.1c.tar.gz

This is a bug-fix release.

The important part of the NEWS file is below.

As far as I can tell, the documentation and code have both hit the
freeze point.

So, why do a beta release? So that you, yes you, the end user, can see
if anything I've done breaks gawk for you.  Then you can TELL ME ABOUT
IT so that I can fix it for the final release.

Thanks,

Arnold Robbins
arnold@skeeve.com
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Changes from 5.2.1 to 5.2.2
---------------------------

1. Infrastructure upgrades: makeinfo 7.0.1 must be used to format
   the manual.  As a result, the manual can also now be formatted
   with LaTeX by running it through `makeinfo --latex'.

2. Gawk no longer builds an x86_64 executable on M1 macOS systems.
   This means that PMA is unavailable on those systems.

3. Gawk will now diagnose if a heap file was created with a different
   setting of -M/--bignum than in the current invocation and exit with
   a fatal message if so.

4. Gawk no longer "leaks" its free list of NODEs in the heap file, resulting
   in much more efficient usage of persistent storage.

5. PROCINFO["pma"] exists if the PMA allocator is compiled into gawk.
   Its value is the PMA version.

6. The time extension is no longer deprecated. The strptime() function
   from gawkextlib's timex extension has been added to it.

7. Better information is passed to input parsers for when they want to
   decide whether or not to take control of a file. In particular, the
   readdir extension is simplified for Windows because of this.

8. The various PNG files are now installed for Info and HTML. The
   images files now have gawk_ prefixed names to avoid any conflicts
   with other installed PNG file names.

9. As usual, there have been several minor code cleanups and bug fixes.
   See the ChangeLog for details.