Another public service announcement :) Automake 1.13 defaults to running tests in parallel. It saves test output into files and just reports pass/fail results for the test as a whole. This doesn't work so well for Guile, which has its own test runner.
The way to work around this is to specify "serial-tests" as an automake option, which is what Guile in git does. However, this option was only introduced in Automake 1.12. So, Guile from git (stable-2.0 and master) requires Automake 1.12, to work around an incompatibility with 1.13 (!). However! Many people use Debian, which only has 1.11. However 1.12 is in experimental. To install automake from experimental, do: sudo apt-get install -t experimental automake It shouldn't bring in any other bleeding-edge deps. See also http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-automake/2013-01/msg00156.html. Cheers, Andy -- http://wingolog.org/