I’ve had a few people run into problems building my program (which vendors SDL2 and SDL2_ttf) due to an automake version specifier in SDL2_ttf. Seems that having a system automake version above the specified version (1.16) causes an error. Here’s an example from someone who reports having automake version 1.18 installed (closed because I added a workaround, but the original issue was never solved).
I think the source of the 1.16 version requirement is this line in the configure script.
I am out of my depth with these build tools, so apologies for being somewhat vague here. If anyone has any insight into what the problem might be, please let me know! Thanks.
Edit to add:
On my raspberry pi, I can work around the issue by creating a symlink that aliases my system’s automake (v1.17) as automake-1.16 (which is not a solution, but demonstrates that automake-1.16 itself should not be a hard requirement).