Am Sonntag, 20. Januar 2013 schrieb Ludovic Courtès:
> I think this is a symptom of using an old Automake (< 1.12, I think),
> which did not define $(abs_top_srcdir).
> Can you confirm?

I thought I could, using guix ;-)

But building the automake package fails with an enormous number of errors 
in the check phase:
============================================================================
Testsuite summary for GNU Automake 1.12.6
============================================================================
# TOTAL: 2530
# PASS:  1318
# SKIP:  259
# XFAIL: 35
# FAIL:  880
# XPASS: 0
# ERROR: 38

Andreas