automake 1.7.7 generates suspicious Makefile.in

[Bruno Haible]

Hi,

here is a case where automake 1.7.7 generates a Makefile.in that contains
a lone line starting with a tab (i.e. a command line outside of any target
rule). It's not clear to me whether such a Makefile is valid (both GNU make
and FreeBSD make appear to consider the line part of the previous target
rule); but it's suspicious enough - POSIX says that in a Makefile, "An empty
or blank line, or a line beginning with '#' , may begin a new entry." - that
I stay with automake 1.7.5 for the moment.

========================= Makefile.am ========================
SUBDIRS = m4
========================= configure.ac =======================
AC_PREREQ(2.57)
AC_INIT
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE(gettext-tools, 0.12)
AC_PROG_CC
AC_CONFIG_FILES([Makefile])
AC_OUTPUT
==============================================================
$ mkdir -p m4
$ aclocal
$ autoconf
$ automake --foreign
configure.ac: required file `../mkinstalldirs' not found
configure.ac: required file `../missing' not found

Now look at the Makefile.in, at the "distclean" and "maintainer-clean"
targets:

======================= .... =======================
distclean: distclean-recursive
        -rm -f $(am__CONFIG_DISTCLEAN_FILES)

        -rm -f Makefile
======================= .... =======================
maintainer-clean: maintainer-clean-recursive
        -rm -f $(am__CONFIG_DISTCLEAN_FILES)
        -rm -rf $(top_srcdir)/autom4te.cache

        -rm -f Makefile
======================= .... =======================

Possibly the culprit is the 2003-07-23 modification of lib/am/clean.am.

Bruno