Is there a way to get more visibility into what autom4te is doing? autom4te --help lists various options (at a glance: --verbose, --debug, --trace=AM_TRY_LOG, who knows what else). I've never actually understood autom4te in the slightest, sorry to say. Maybe best to bring it up on bug-autoc...@gnu.org? Although some of the autoconf developers are here on bug-automake, not all.
The only failure case is when our source tree has been reconfigured with 1.17.0 Maybe it's a problem with autoreconf, another autoconf tool, though admittedly that doesn't seem likely. --thanks, karl.