Hi, FreeBSD 13.1 'make', NetBSD 9.0 'make', AIX 7.1 and 7.2 'make' are perfectly fine for building many GNU packages, even as VPATH builds. Jim Meyering has now put out a tarball for testing, that uses bleeding-edge Automake: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/platform-testers/2023-02/msg00012.html When I build this tarball on FreeBSD, NetBSD, or AIX — in srcdir or as a VPATH build, does not matter —, the build fails, like this: ------------------------------------------------------ ... CC libgreputils_a-getopt1.o CC libgreputils_a-getprogname.o make: 1254-002 Cannot find a rule to create target malloc/.dirstamp from dependencies. Stop. make: 1254-004 The error code from the last command is 2. Stop. make: 1254-004 The error code from the last command is 1. Stop. make: 1254-004 The error code from the last command is 2. Stop. ------------------------------------------------------ This is a regression, caused by the bleeding-edge Automake, because when I unpack the tarball and then (with Automake 1.16.5 in $PATH) do aclocal -I m4 automake touch configure touch config.hin it does not exhibit this build failure any more. Find attached the diff between lib/Makefile (that fails) and lib/Makefile (that comes from Automake 1.16.5 and works fine). You can see that with individual rules for malloc/$(am__dirstamp), glthread/$(am__dirstamp), unistr/$(am__dirstamp), uniwidth/$(am__dirstamp) the build works fine, whereas with the pattern rule %/$(am__dirstamp) it fails. I guess that the commit "dirstamp: switch to a pattern rule" is the culprit. https://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=automake.git;a=commitdiff;h=55f8fcfd08cbf15d65d61dd2db934b6c3171cf06 Bruno
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