You seem to be relying on automake's aclocal program to combine the
config/*.m4 files into aclocal.m4. I can see no value in introducing
this additional package dependency, since as far as I can tell aclocal
isn't doing anything for us that 'cat' couldn't do.
I recommend removing config/*.m4 in favor of a single aclocal.m4 file.
This also gets rid of the need for at least one of the broken
dependencies in the toplevel makefile.
For that matter, I don't see any really good reason for having
aclocal.m4 in the first place. If we were maintaining a bunch of
packages that had some reason to share configure macros, aclocal.m4
would make sense. We are not, so there's no really good reason not to
just keep all the configure code in configure.in. Introducing more
files just creates more ways to screw up.
I'd like this to get resolved PDQ. Regression tests are currently
failing for me because the int8-related configure tests are busted.
I can't fix it unless I go and install automake, which I don't
really care to do unless there is a consensus that automake should
become a required tool for Postgres developers.
regards, tom lane
