newbie automake help

[Jay West]

I've gone through info files and FAQ's and googled and have no direction on
this problem. Perhaps someone here can give me a gentle nudge in the right
direction.

Automake generates makefiles that do a "make dvi" only when one does a "make
distcheck". Just "make" or "make dist" don't include a "make dvi". Can
someone clue me in on why this is? Obviously I know what is/isnot happening,
but I'm curious why this was done this way by default.

This is somewhat problematic for me as FreeBSD 4.9 for some unexplained
reason does NOT include texi2dvi, I'm still scratching my head on why that
is. It's mentioned in the README files under contrib/texinfo/util/README,
but isn't actually there.

I don't see why make distcheck would do a "make dvi" by default. Is there a
way to turn that off on a distcheck?

Thanks so much in advance for any guidance!

Jay West
address@hidden