search for: autobook_216

...f configure is passed an interpreter path by the user > which doesn't exist (as my debian packaging makefile just did). A problem is that "test -x" isn't portable, at least according to the goat book - see the bottom of this page: http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/autobook/autobook_216.html I don't know which platforms it isn't supported on, but this message suggests it's not a totally academic concern: http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/2002-12/msg00098.html With your fix to use $PYTHON instead of python, test -x isn't actually needed AFAICS - the case...