Gawk 5.3.0 released

[Aharon Robbins]

Greetings all.

This note announces the next release of GNU Awk: version 5.3.0.

The following files may be retrieved via HTTPS from
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gawk:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold 6254035 Nov  2 15:38 gawk-5.3.0.tar.gz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold 3307027 Nov  2 15:37 gawk-5.3.0.tar.lz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 arnold arnold 3436180 Nov  2 15:38 gawk-5.3.0.tar.xz

This is a major release.  The relevant part of the NEWS file is appended
below. A diff file from the previous release is not available.

The online manuals have also been updated.

The usual GNU build incantation should be used:

        tar -xpvzf gawk-5.3.0.tar.gz
        cd gawk-5.3.0
        ./configure && make && make check

Please use the gawkbug script to report bugs. If it doesn't
work for you, then send email to bug-gawk@gnu.org.

NOTE that the manual's instructions for sending bug reports were
updated for the earlier 5.2.0 release. Please review them carefully before
submitting a report!

ONLY bug reports should be submitted to the bug-gawk list. All other
questions should use the help-gawk@gnu.org mailing list.

Enjoy!

Arnold Robbins (on behalf of all the gawk developers)
arnold@skeeve.com
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   Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
   are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
   notice and this notice are preserved.

Changes from 5.2.x to 5.3.0
---------------------------

1. Infrastructure changes: Removed the use of libsigsegv. The
   value-add was never very much and it caused problems in some
   environments.

2. In keeping with new features in BWK awk, gawk now has built-in
   CSV file parsing. The behavior is intended to be identical to
   that of the "One True AWK" when --csv is applied. See the
   manual for details.

3. Also in keeping with BWK awk, gawk now supports a new \u escape
   sequence. This should be followed by 1-8 hexadecimal digits. The
   given code point is converted to its corresponding multibyte encoding
   for storage inside gawk. See the manual.

4. If PROCINFO["BUFFERPIPE"] exists, then pipe output is buffered.
   You can also use PROCINFO["command", "BUFFERPIPE"]. See the manual
   for details.

5. Because of the additional `do_csv' variable in the API, which breaks
   binary compatibility, the API major version was updated to 4 and
   the minor version was reset to zero.  The API remains source code
   compatible; that is, existing extensions should only require recompilation.

6. The manual now requires Texinfo 7.1 and its texinfo.tex for formatting.
   As a result, we no longer need to pre-process it, removing the need
   for gawktexi.in and leaving just gawk.texi.

7. And of course, there have been several minor code cleanups and bug fixes.
   See the ChangeLog for details.

Changes from 5.2.2 to 5.2.x
---------------------------

1. The readdir extension has been updated with additonal code and
   features, see the manual or its man page. As a result, the
   readdir_test.c extension has been removed.

2. We have a new translation: Ukranian.

3. Several subtle issues related to null regexp matches around
   multibyte characters have been fixed.