I am not quite the autoconf expert you are looking for, but the basic plan for distcheck is to unpack the distfile, and then to do an objdir build and then make check, to validate that the distfile was produced correctly.
I don't think "steps are not in same order" is a fair complaint because to be pedantic make doesn't have a spec for an order. It is merely obligated to respect the expressed dependencies, and various things may be a little different. So the real question is if the order is wrong and how you can argue that. I would ask: If make is building something before something it needs is built, how are you expressing that in the makefile? What if you, on a machine with lots of CPUs, do "make -j32" in the original build? is that 100% reliable? What if you take the distfile to another machine, unpack it, mkdir BUILD, cd BUILD, ../configure, make, make check? Does that work?
