In order for the Automake testsuite to be able to use sub-second delays [...]
I installed the patch (plus a tweak to NEWS). (make check and distcheck ran fine for me, including using the subsecond feature.) I included all the commentary from your message, Zack, since I thought it would likely be helpful to anyone looking at this in the future. There might be a better place to put this, somewhere it'll execute every time the *overall testsuite* is invoked rather than once for each test, but I couldn't find one. Maybe am__check_pre in lib/am/check.am, where other such things are done, like handling sh -e, vpath, etc. But I will leave this for another time. Thanks Zack. Fingers crossed that this resolves this thorny issue once and for all ... -k