Hi again, I just realized this is actually not a bug, and was simply caused by the -f option passed to autoreconf.
Autoreconf seems to forward it to automake as the --force-missing option, which, according to the manual, "force[s] update of standard files". Autoreconf's man entry for -f simply states that it will "consider all files obsolete", which for me wasn't very clear about its implications, so I couldn't link it to the unwanted behavior I was experiencing. More info: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/197327/103132 Cheers, Emil Laine <laine.e...@gmail.com>