help with gettext and make distcheck

[Gavin Smith]

What a mess. I've tried upgrading gettext, but when I run "make dist"
I get the error:

test ! -f texinfo.po || { \
  if test -f ../../../po/texinfo.pot-header; then \
    sed -e '1,/^#$/d' < texinfo.po > texinfo.1po && \
    cat ../../../po/texinfo.pot-header texinfo.1po > texinfo.po; \
    rm -f texinfo.1po; \
  fi; \
  if test -f ../../../po/texinfo.pot; then \
    sed -f remove-potcdate.sed < ../../../po/texinfo.pot > texinfo.1po && \
    sed -f remove-potcdate.sed < texinfo.po > texinfo.2po && \
    if cmp texinfo.1po texinfo.2po >/dev/null 2>&1; then \
      rm -f texinfo.1po texinfo.2po texinfo.po; \
    else \
      rm -f texinfo.1po texinfo.2po ../../../po/texinfo.pot && \
      mv texinfo.po ../../../po/texinfo.pot; \
    fi; \
  else \
    mv texinfo.po ../../../po/texinfo.pot; \
  fi; \
}
rm: cannot remove '../../../po/texinfo.pot': Permission denied
make[5]: *** [texinfo.pot-update] Error 1
make[5]: Leaving directory
`/home/g/src/texinfo/PROJ_SVN/texinfo-6.0dev/_build/sub/po'

I've tried two or three times, running autoconf, running gnulib-tool
--add-import, following steps at
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/gettextize-and-autopoint.html,
but no success: I get the same error each time.

This is an old problem, see
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-automake/2002-01/msg00014.html

If anyone remembers the right way to do this, please say so, otherwise
I'll just have to keep trying until I succeed.