Thanks Tom for pointing this out. We have to all keep these autotools versions synced: it bugs everybody to have extraneous differences in trees due to version mis-match.
>Unfortunately, we have automake 1.9.3, 1.9.4 and 1.9.5 floating >throughout the tree. How did this happen? >I propose standardizing the entire tree on 1.9.6, >as it is the current release; moreover the 1.9 branch has only had a >few minor patches since 1.9.6 was released 6 weeks ago so 1.9.6 might >be stable for a while. I am in support of this. The sooner the better. >> Probably we should have a script in contrib/ that downloads and >> builds all the currently-required tool versions. >This would be very cool. That seems like the only solution to end this continual issue. I'm strongly in favor of it. -benjamin