I was able to bootstrap, configure, build and install automake-1.16j.
Great! Is there any other testing I should do? If you're up for it, you could run make -j8 check (or -jwhatever) just to see if other tests fail. (It will take several hours to run without the -j, although unfortunately the -j might also induce spurious failures. Always looking for more data about this to try to make things more robust.) Thanks, Karl