I thought we were talking about automake's testsuite probing the behavior of *autom4te*
Yes, exactly. Sorry for the confusion. $ ./tests/autom4te --version autom4te (GNU Autoconf) 2.72d.6-49ab3-dirty (subsecond timestamps supported) Looks good to me. Thanks. a third party CPAN module Good point. The implementation is just Your patch sent to the autoconf list looked fine to me, FWIW. Perhaps worth mentioning somewhere that Automake is the consumer of this information that caused the change. You could point to https://bugs.gnu.org/64756 if you want something more convenient than the long multi-month thread on the automake discussion list (which I pointed to from that bug). Jacob, can you confirm that's an accurate test, +1 for Jacob's confirmation being welcome :).