Debugging the distcheck target

Here are common issues that can arise when you first run make distcheck

A file or directory does not exist

Symptom: You run the build (e.g., make check) and everything's fine, but make distcheck fails because a file or directory was not present.
Try: In the code, look for places where you used the autotools variable @srcddir@ (or @top_srcdir@ or @abs_srcdir@ or @abs_top_srcdir@) to refer a file or directory that is generated. In a regular build (e.g., make check) that will work fine since the src and build directories are one and the same. With make distcheck, not so much since the build (the generated) files are in a different directory from the source. To fix this, use @builddir@ (or the obvious variant).

A directory with generated content is not cleaned

Symptom: The make distcheck target complains that a directory contains files after the various clean operations.
Try: Add the latent files to the DISTCLEANFILES variable of the Makefile.am. Use a shell pattern to remove all of the files in a directory when the directory itself should not be removed. For example, DISTCLEANFILES=atconfig cache/*