Under certain very reasonable scenarios, the configure file contained within some source tree may perhaps be marked as read-only. When and if this occurs, automake will fail to remove the configure file before it attempts to generate it anew. The following trivial patch corrects this problem.
I would really appreciate it if this small patch could be incorporated into future releases of automake. It does no harm, and it can provably do some good in certain circumstances. diff -rc2 src/automake-1.11.5/lib/am/configure.am build/automake-1.11.5/lib/am/configure.am *** src/automake-1.11.5/lib/am/configure.am 2012-04-13 07:46:00.000000000 -0700 --- build/automake-1.11.5/lib/am/configure.am 2012-04-25 15:05:50.000000000 -0700 *************** *** 107,111 **** $(top_srcdir)/configure: %MAINTAINER-MODE% $(am__configure_deps) ! ?TOPDIR_P? $(am__cd) $(srcdir) && $(AUTOCONF) ?!TOPDIR_P? cd $(top_builddir) && $(MAKE) $(AM_MAKEFLAGS) am--refresh --- 107,111 ---- $(top_srcdir)/configure: %MAINTAINER-MODE% $(am__configure_deps) ! ?TOPDIR_P? $(am__cd) $(srcdir) && rm -f $(top_srcdir)/configure && $(AUTOCONF) ?!TOPDIR_P? cd $(top_builddir) && $(MAKE) $(AM_MAKEFLAGS) am--refresh
