make dist-all produces an empty tarball

[Larry Siden]

I'm a newbie to using autoconf & automake & Co.  I'm using it for a
small project.  

The build and install work fine, but when I run "make dist-all" it
produces an empty .tar.gz file (well, not quite empty, it actually
contains 20 bytes, which I guess consist of some header info). 

I was wondering if someone on this list might be willing to help me. 
This is my last hurdle to releasing my masterpiece to the world. ;)  If
you are willing, I could send you a gzip tarball of my while project
(after running "make clean" of course!), or just the configure.ac and
Makefile.am files along with a recursive dir listing - whatever you
think will be most helpful.

I tried researching this issue in the archive by searching for "dist-all
empty" but did not come up with anything relevant.

Version info:
        aclocal 1.5
        autoconf 2.57
        automake 1.5
        GNU make 3.80

With thanks in adv.,
Larry Siden

PS - While I've got your ear - there are a couple other related issues:

1) No "dist-gzip" target ever gets produced, despite documentation in
http://www.gnu.org/manual/automake/html_chapter/automake_15.html#SEC95. 
This isn't a biggie, but the docs may need to be corrected.  Hey!  On
second thought, I wonder if this is the origin of the problem described
above!?

2) AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE
The following sequence:

 
AC_INIT(mumble, 1.5)
AC_CONFIG_SRCDIR(src/foo.c)
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE

as documented in
http://www.gnu.org/manual/automake/html_chapter/automake_5.html#SEC23 is
not sufficient for automake (on my box) to generate definitions for
PACKAGE and VERSION in the Makefile.  Instead, I had to provide two
arguments to AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE in order to achieve this, usage which the
documentation describes as "obsolete".

3) aclocal comments out the AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE definition in file
aclocal.m4.  After running aclocal, it was necessary for me to edit
aclocal.m4 and uncomment the definition in order to use AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE
at all.  I checked if aclocal has some option to reverse this, but did
not find any.