It turns out it is not a bug--just general error/quirk.
Okay, I found the error, and the reason why I been going insane over
this over the past few hours.
My filenames have semi-colons in them. That is what triggered the
"missing separator" error.
Makefile.am:
------------
# filename with semi-colons
template_file = data;sectionfoo;foo-1
dist_pkgdata_DATA = $(template_file)
# generated Makefile rule here would cause make crash
$(dist_pkgdata_DATA): Makefile
@echo 'no-op for datafile' $@
My solution is to use the transformation program option of Autotools
(via configure.ac).
Sorry for the inconvenience.
-- penguindude24
