When I build syslinux, I normally do make spotless make but this fails with syslinux-3.31 because of 4 files: ./com32/lib/sys/vesa/.background.o.d ./com32/lib/sys/vesa/.drawtxt.o.d ./com32/lib/sys/vesa/.alphatbl.o.d ./com32/lib/sys/vesa/.initvesa.o.d The .initvesa.o.d has some redhat specific path that does not exist on my system: /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/4.1.1/include/stdarg.h If I do this: make spotless find . -name '.*.d' -exec rm {} \; make then everything is ok. Please consider adding the removal of such files to the 'make spotless' command.