They all appear to be cases of autoconf and/or aclocal getting run when the test suite does not expect them to be run. I am stumped as to why
In short: because the 2.70 autom4te decided not to update configure. I don't know why not, but I have a guess: maybe the new autom4te ignores everything after AC_OUTPUT. Is that correct? Because that is where some of these tests are adding a new AC_ macro. In long: I focused on the libobj-basic test since it was simpler than the distcheck-* tests. That test ends with a common sequence. First append to configure.ac to test an additional case: cat configure.proto - > configure.ac <<END AC_LIBSOURCES([maude.c, liver.c]) END Then run the autotools (I added --verbose:) $ACLOCAL --verbose $AUTOCONF --verbose $AUTOMAKE --verbose ./configure And then run make check: $MAKE check With 2.70, the make check fails because it tries to run autoconf. make -dn in the build directory (namely ../t/distcheck-missing-m4.dir/distcheck-missing-m4-1.0/_build/sub) reported that autoconf was needed because configure.ac and aclocal.m4 were newer than configure. And this was, in fact, true. So, backing up in the test, I checked the timestamps after each one of the above steps, by inserting the line ls -lt --full-time aclocal.m4 configure.ac configure to libobj-basic.sh in all those places. This showed that in the successful run with autoconf 2.69, it was the $AUTOCONF run that updated configure (as one would expect). In the failing run with autoconf 2.70, the $AUTOCONF run ends with the line: autom4te: 'configure' is unchanged The failure follows. I'll attach the modified test and the failing and successful log files for the heck of it. (I could not discern any notable difference from the autom4te output.) Here is the final configure.ac in question: ------------------------------------ AC_INIT([libobj-basic], [1.0]) AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE AC_CONFIG_FILES([Makefile]) AC_PROG_CC AM_PROG_AR AC_PROG_RANLIB AC_OUTPUT AC_LIBSOURCES([maude.c, liver.c]) ------------------------------------ I don't think we're so lucky that all of the failing tests are failing because of this, but I think it might account for more than one. -k
libobj-basic.sh
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a69ok-libobj-basic.log.gz
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a70fail-libobj-basic.log.gz
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