Running 'make clean && make' loses all the .3 man pages produced from generated .pod files. Why? When Makefile.inc does not exist (on the first run), the value of $(api_built) is updated prior to re-reading the Makefile, so when the 'all-am: Makefile $(MANS)' dependency from automake is encountered, $(MANS) includes all the .3 files. But after 'make clean', Makefile.inc still exists, and it is included late enough that $(MANS) still contains the pre-inclusion state, omitting all the generated additions. The solution is to add yet another dependency, which Automake leaves late enough to always occur after $(MANS) has its full value. Reported-by: Richard W.M. Jones <rjones(a)redhat.com&gt; Fixes: 0a8d3987 --- Counter-proposal for Rich's change. I'll go ahead and push it. docs/Makefile.am | 6 +++++- 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/docs/Makefile.am b/docs/Makefile.am index 30a972d..dd34a3a 100644 --- a/docs/Makefile.am +++ b/docs/Makefile.am @@ -21,8 +21,12 @@ api_built= # Our use of sinclude to bypass Automake is intentional; this file won't # exist in a fresh git checkout until after the generator has run, but -# should already be present in any released tarball. +# should already be present in any released tarball. But, since automake +# can't see into this file, it did not hoist the resulting prerequisites +# prior to its 'all-am: Makefile $(MANS)' rule, which gets parsed before +# $(MANS) has grown in size, so we have to add a second all-am dependency. sinclude $(srcdir)/Makefile.inc +all-am: $(api_built:%=%.3) generator_built = \ Makefile.inc \ -- 2.20.1