This release has a number of substantial changes over version 1.3. The most visible change is that the version of Expect and Tcl included in the release are up-to-date with the current stable net releases. The biggest change is years of modifications to the target configuration system, used for cross testing. While this greatly improved cross testing, is has made that subsystem very complicated. The goal is to have this entirely rewritten using iTcl by the next release. Other changes are:
More builtin support for building target binaries with the correct linker flags. Currently this only works with GCC as the cross compiler, preferably with a target supported by Libgloss.
Lots of little bug fixes from years of heavy use at Cygnus Solutions.
DejaGnu now uses Automake for Makefile configuration.
Updated documentation, now in SGML (using the free GNU DocBook tools) format.
NT support. There is beta level support for NT that is still a work in progress. This requires the Cygwin POSIX system for NT.
To use DejaGnu on NT, you need to first install the Cygwin release. This works as of the B20.1 release. Cygwin is a POSIX system for NT. This covers both utility programs, and a libray that adds POSIX system calls to NT. Among them is pseudo tty support for NT that emulates the POSIX pty standard. The latest Cygwin is always available from this location. This works well enough to run "make check" of the GNU development tree on NT after a native build. But the nature of pty's on NT is still evolving. Your mileage may vary...