FYI, macOS has an old bison (version 2.3 from 2006). I'm not sure if automake theoretically support bison going back that far, but I'm not going to worry about it since many errors disappear with the new bison. Thanks for thinking of that.
In both aclocal-deleted-header.sh and aclocal-deleted-header-aclocal-amflags.sh, isn't an additional "$ACLOCAL -I . && $AUTOMAKE && $AUTOCONF && ./configure" needed before the second $MAKE? Very likely. I saw similar omitted autocalls in other tests. I will look as soon as I have a chance. --thanks again, karl.