Works for me, but don't we need to change the GNU coding standards to do even that?
To my eyes, the coding standards only prescribe the existence of the various dvi targets and variables. They don't say that making dvi is a dependency of either check or installcheck. The distcheck target is not mentioned in the standards, so we can change its behavior with impunity. If we wanted to no longer require dvi files to be distributed with the other formats on www.gnu.org (which sounds fine to me), that would need a small change to maintain.texi. --best, karl.