Severity: wishlist This issue was brought up by Ralf Wildenhues in a thread on automake-patches. Automake generally orders all of its variable settings before all of the user ones (so the user ones are preferred). But when one overrides e.g. bindir in a Makefile.am, that variable doesn't get reordered to the user part, because it is actually automake-set before it is overridden. The issue is exposed in the attached testcase. It's still not clear to me whether this is a bug or a feature, but I thought that entering it into the Automake bug database would be a good idea anyway. Regards, Stefano