From: Jan Engelhardt There are some manual commands which create dependency files, and they do fail if they concurrently try to create the directory (because it does something like test -e auto || mkdir auto, rather than checking just the return value of mkdir for EISDIR.) Anyway, create the directory beforehand. --- Makefile.am | 1 + configure.ac | 1 + 2 files changed, 2 insertions(+) Index: schismtracker-20170910/Makefile.am =================================================================== --- schismtracker-20170910.orig/Makefile.am +++ schismtracker-20170910/Makefile.am @@ -141,6 +141,7 @@ CLEANFILES = \ auto/helptext.c auto/default-font.c: Makefile.am scripts/bin2h.sh scripts/build-font.sh $(fonts) + ${MKDIR_P} auto sh $(srcdir)/scripts/build-font.sh $(srcdir) $(fonts) >$@ auto/helptext.c: Makefile.am scripts/genhelp.py $(helptexts) $(PYTHON) $(srcdir)/scripts/genhelp.py $(srcdir) $(helptexts) >$@ Index: schismtracker-20170910/configure.ac =================================================================== --- schismtracker-20170910.orig/configure.ac +++ schismtracker-20170910/configure.ac @@ -39,6 +39,7 @@ AC_PROG_CPP AC_PROG_INSTALL AC_PROG_LN_S AC_PROG_CC_C99 +AC_PROG_MKDIR_P dnl do we have Git AC_CHECK_TOOL([GIT], [git])