[tex-live] Can anybody remember what timestamps texinfo needs?

[Karl Berry]

    The texinfo maintainers

Hey, that's not some anonymous group of random people, it's me :).

    have added maintainer-specific 
    dependencies to the Makefile. 

I do use the automake conditional feature in doc/Makefile.am
so that installers don't have to have help2man installed.
Is that what you're talking about?  I don't see the problem with it,
though, since of course configure does not depend on the man pages.

    As a result, there is a circular 
    dependency (Makefile -> configure -> Makefile). 

I don't see it.  Where?  Please be specific, so I can fix it.

    Requiring autoconf on the 'user' side is against 
    the whole 'auto*' philosophy.

Obviously I agree.

    So, do not blame perforce. Blame the texinfio maintainers who have
    gone one step to far

As far as I know all I'm doing is using automake in a completely
standard way.  I don't think that's "going too far".

    in trying to automate their maintenance work,
    thereby making texinfo brittle for users.

I have never received a bug report about this problem from anyone who's
installed Texinfo normally -- only you-all who have copied it into
perforce :).

Does any other program in TL use automake?  It seems to me that any
distribution that uses automake would have the same problems.