Small update: I've given Anton Gladky access to a machine where this seems to happen all the time. (While we are at it: Anybody reading this willing to debug the problem in the test machine, please contact me privately and I will gladly give you access as well).
It is interesting to see that this also fails in reproducible-builds: https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/rbuild/unstable/amd64/liggghts_3.8.0+repack1-2.rbuild.log.gz but the way it fails is slightly different, and that's why I think it is a Makefile bug of some kind. I'm no CMAKE expert at all, but in our test machine, the error message is like this: style_atom.h: No such file or directory So: Where is that style_atom.h file supposed to be generated and how does the different Makefiles ensure that it's generated *before* it's actually being used? Thanks.