I build most projects using autoconf and automake that I've built and installed myself, from their respective latest "master" git revision.
With that constraint, I've found it necessary to use the attached patch in order to make coreutils' "make distcheck" pass:
From 5bf01120f0a76a37b0c0ea54880e1aba9747d382 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jim Meyering <[email protected]> Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2016 14:16:40 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] maint: avoid "make distcheck" failure due to excess .deps directories * Makefile.am (my-distcheck): Remove all .deps directories before recursive diff search for left-behind files. Otherwise, with automake master (v1.15-165-g5fac9a3), "make distcheck" would fail due to those directories being left behind after "make clean". --- dist-check.mk | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) diff --git a/dist-check.mk b/dist-check.mk index 533b7f9..2ac26d4 100644 --- a/dist-check.mk +++ b/dist-check.mk @@ -120,6 +120,7 @@ my-distcheck: $(DIST_ARCHIVES) $(local-check) ) (cd $(t) && mv $(distdir) $(distdir).old \ && $(amtar_extract_) - ) < $(preferred_tarball_) + find $(t)/$(distdir).old $(t)/$(distdir) -name .deps | xargs rmdir diff -ur $(t)/$(distdir).old $(t)/$(distdir) -rm -rf $(t) rmdir $(tmpdir)/$(PACKAGE) $(tmpdir) -- 2.9.3
