After all the trouble I had getting the problem with the AC_Dest macro error in Bookcase fixed for version 0.6.1, it popped back up in a different incarnation. Something is screwing up the timestamps on the build files in my source tarball, and as a result, make wants to rebuild configure from configure.in, which it shouldn’t have to do. And this prevents Bookcase from building cleanly on Redhat 8. Dang it… After this, I detest the auto* system.

I think I found a solution, a temporary one at least. In the top-level bookcase-0.6.1 directory, touch some files in this order:
$ touch configure.in
$ touch aclocal.m4
$ touch Makefile.in
$ touch config.h.in
$ touch configure
and then run ./configure && make. That should fix it so that autoconf is not required to run again. I think…