The automake manual recommends against the use of disabling maintainer mode by default: https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/automake.html#maintainer_002... because when it is disabled, the user gets no indication if they touch a file that would normally require a rebuild. Automake 1.11 changed things so that AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([enable]) will set the mode to enabled by default; but RHEL 5 still uses automake 1.9, where AM_MAINTAINER_MODE did not recognize an argument, and therefore disables maintainer mode by default. Having the default be different according to which version of automake built the project is annoying, and I _have_ been bitten on RHEL 5 rebuilds where the default disabled mode led to silently incorrect builds. The automake manual admits that being able to disable maintainer mode still makes sense for projects that still store generated files from the autotools in version control; but we have dropped that for several years now. As such, it's finally time to just ditch the whole idea of maintainer mode, and unconditionally rebuild autotools files if a dependency changes, without offering a configure option to disable that mode. * configure.ac (AM_MAINTAINER_MODE): Drop. Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <eblake(a)redhat.com&gt; --- configure.ac | 1 - 1 file changed, 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/configure.ac b/configure.ac index 7e357c4..024b0c8 100644 --- a/configure.ac +++ b/configure.ac @@ -24,7 +24,6 @@ AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([m4]) dnl Make automake keep quiet about wildcards & other GNUmake-isms; also keep dnl quiet about the fact that we intentionally cater to automake 1.9 AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([-Wno-portability -Wno-obsolete tar-ustar subdir-objects]) -AM_MAINTAINER_MODE([enable]) # Maintainer note - comment this line out if you plan to rerun # GNULIB_POSIXCHECK testing to see if libvirt should be using more modules. -- 1.8.3.1