- Have them distributed (automake's default). This means that they will be build in the srcdir, not in the builddir: of course, this only affects the maintainer, since for a user that builds the package from a tarball those files should *not* be rebuilt, hence there is no problem even if the user's srcdir is read-only.
This has always been the right way to do things. - Don't distribute the generated info files. [...] In this case, the user will have to to have the 'makeinfo' program available to build them. Please don't do this, it causes all kinds of headaches, like the small fact that makeinfo will now be required to bootstrap.