Also I observe that there were previous patches to ensure most uses of
keys() were sorted. However not all of them, including diagnostics,
and various other places where the key order could be exposed to a
user.

Attached is a patch that I believe fixes any remaining uses of unsorted keys.

I took the policy that automake is not performance sensitive, at least
at the level of sorting keys, and that sorting something that is not
strictly necessary does no harm.

I admit I have not been able to properly test all of these changes,
but superficial testing does not reveal any issues.

Anyway, sorry for the misleading original bug-report.

Cheers,
Yves

-- 
perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"