I switched over to a whole other server and tried again with 
very few dependencies installed. The result was 8 failures : 

============================================================================
Testsuite summary for GNU Automake 1.14
============================================================================
# TOTAL: 2708
# PASS: 2377
# SKIP: 282
# XFAIL: 41
# FAIL: 8
# XPASS: 0
# ERROR: 0
============================================================================

So I am at a loss how to proceed here. Simply put it looks like automake 1.14
will not build cleanly on Solaris 10 and I need to revert to an earlier version.

Dennis 

ps: test-suite log attached