"make dist" and "make distcheck" trouble

[David Bruce]

My project is not creating valid tarballs with "make dist", and "make
distcheck" fails at the VPATH build stage.

1.  My project has all the *.c source files in a src directory under
trunk.  I normally always do vpath builds, and the svn src directory
contains no object files.  In the tarball, however, the src directory
contains not only the source files, but all the object files as well,
and also copies of anything else in the svn src directory - foo.o,
foo.c~ and the like.

2. If I do an in-tree build on the tarball, it works.
3. If I do a vpath build on the tarball, it fails - no *.o files get
made in the build/src directory.
4. If I first remove all the *.o files that are (incorrectly) included
in the tarball src directory, then do a vpath build, it succeeds.
5. If I do a make distcheck from either the tarball or svn, either
in-tree or vpath, it fails at make distcheck's own vpath stage.
6. The project has two other source subdirs at the same level as src
that get handled correctly.

So somehow "make dist" is wrongly putting the object files for src
into the tarball in an "in-tree" fashion, and this apparently confuses
a subsequent vpath build into not compiling the needed files.  Plus,
"make dist" is copying absolutely everything from the svn src
directory into the tarball, even files never mentioned in any
Makefile.am

I've looked at the top-level and src Makefile.am files for flags that
might be wrong, without seeing any clear culprit.  I would be happy to
post whatever files or output might help figure this out.

Does any of this sound like any familiar problem?

Thanks for any help,

David Bruce