Mon 09 May 2016 04:29:01 PM UTC, comment #4:
It was interesting to see that the problem was with the double colon rule (to build the file in any situation). So I also searched for .PHONY targest in `make distcheck' and I found out that a similar issue was discussed before in the following Automake mailing list:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2015-03/msg00064.html
So as suggested in the final answer to that problem (and argued in the commit message, below), I thought the best way would be to set a prerequisite for doc/authors.texi to fix the problem. The fix has been merged to master.
The commit (418f331) message is:
Creation of the Texinfo book source depends on doc/authors.texi. Until now doc/authors.texi was a double colon target with no prerequisits, meaning that it would be built when ever the manual needed to be built. So in `make distcheck', where we don't have write permissions in the source directory (which contains doc/authors.texi), this would cause problems.
A similar problem was reported before in the link below:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2015-03/msg00070.html
The first solution proposed to this problem is possible, but is a little dirty/complex (involves temporary files). However the final answer is more elegant. In practice, we only want this file (and thus the manual authors) updated when a new version is released (official or unofficial), when the developers are working for themselves, there is no need to update the authors list.
Fortunately we have recently adopted the automatic version numbering (from Gnulib's git-version-gen). In the book we have also advised everyone to generate a new version if they plan to use their cloned/developed version in any data analysis, or paper, or if they want to share their work (by running `autoreconf -f'). That procedure will update `./configure' and thus regenerate the authors list for the manual too.
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