I think I've fixed this. The problem boiled down to when an include in a Makefile.am actually happened. On some systems (our AIX boxes) the include makes it all the way into Makefile, and is performed by make, so the configured local.mk ought to be included. On other systems (eg. my cygwin) automake seems to process the include statement, so it should include local.mk.in. So theres an ambiguity. To make a long story short, I've implemented a "fix" proposed by Peter in which configure substitutes "include local.mk" for @LOCALMAKE@, so only make sees the include statement and in all cases including local.mk is the right answer.
Greg
