Hi Vincent. As far as I know, --add-missing has never checked for whether its versions are older. I don't know of a reasonable way to change this -- it's a common problem, and also inevitable, given asynchronous releases of everything involved. Instead, it doesn't install over existing files.
I believe you can stop Automake from dealing with texinfo.tex by 1) specifying the no-texinfo-tex Automake option, or 2) (perhaps better) setting the TEXINFO_TEX variable, or 3) creating doc/texinfo.tex yourself before running it, as in: ln -s /usr/share/texmf/tex/texinfo/texinfo.tex doc/texinfo.tex or 4) removing the undesired link/copy afterward (of course). I realize none of these are really satisfactory, but I can't think of anything better. I don't think it's feasible for automake to go poking around the system trying to find other versions of the "missing" files to compare against. There'd be no way to know what's really wanted, seems to me. For example, one could imagine running kpsewhich texinfo.tex and comparing versions (already prone to problems) ... but you might be making a test or other hierarchy where you explicitly do not want the behavior to depend on what the current system has installed. I'm open to other ideas. --best, karl.
