On Sat, 2025-05-31 at 00:13 +0200, Christoph Grüninger via Discussion list for automake wrote: > I played around and this is the sequence the package process is > currently executing: > > > tar .. > > sh bootstrap > > make > > make install > > The issue vanished after I remove the call to bootstrap. I checked > and it was not changed in the last couple of years. This leaves me > puzzled, why the current sequence stopped working.
Aha! I am not familiar with automake's development model, but in general for all GNU packages, at least: The bootstrap script is for users who are checking the code out of a source control facility like Git or CVS, and building that way. For those people, they are expected to have ALL the developer tools such as makeinfo etc. available to them as part of their development process. You should not run bootstrap if you are downloading a source tarball that is already created for you, for example from the GNU FTP site. A source tarball is able to be built without needing extra tools such as makeinfo etc. precisely *because* the person who created the source tarball had all those tools and ran the bootstrap script already, so you don't need to.
