I decided to see what would happen when I changed: man_MANS = autogen.1
into: nodit_man_MANS = autogen.1 I got some curious stuff: > install-man1: $(man1_MANS) $(man_MANS) > @$(NORMAL_INSTALL) > test -z "$(man1dir)" || $(mkdir_p) "$(DESTDIR)$(man1dir)" > @list='$(man1_MANS) $(dist_man1_MANS) $(nodist_man1_MANS)'; \ > l2='$(man_MANS) $(dist_man_MANS) $(nodist_man_MANS)'; \ > for i in $$l2; do \ This is curious stuff because there are no definitions for either "man1_MANS" or "man_MANS", though there is now obviously a definition for "nodist_man_man" (populating "l2"). Since we now have: MANS = $(nodist_man_MANS) all-am : ... $(MANS) .... it gets built, but it doesn't look like "install" is going to work very well. I think it will always fire. Anyway, this fiddling did not fix the infinite recursion on Solaris and I see no obvious fix, except dropping back to an earlier automake :-(. (Short of distributing "autogen.1" which is directly derivable from the distribution itself) $ rsh ${nfsplatform} gmake --version GNU Make version 3.79.1, by Richard Stallman and Roland McGrath. $ automake --version automake (GNU automake) 1.8.3 $ autoconf --version autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.59