AC_CONFIG_FILES problem with Automake 1.7.1

[Tamara L Dahlgren]

I am having a problem with parsing associated with AC_CONFIG_FILES using
automake 1.7.1 that does not show up when using automake 1.6.3.  In
particular, I get the following error:

------------------------------------
> automake-1.7
/tmp/t4PxCiXS/traces.m4:981: /usr/casc/babel/apps/buildtools/bin/m4:
Error matching regular expression "^ *\(.*\) *$"
Use of uninitialized value in split at
/usr/casc/babel/apps/linux/bin/automake-1.7 line 5078, <GEN0> line 229.
automake-1.7: no `Makefile.am' found or specified
>
------------------------------------

The associated configure.ac macro contains a very long list of files
that use the continuation character.  A snippet is as follows:

------------------------------------
[...]
AC_CONFIG_FILES([ \
        Makefile \
        bin/Makefile \
        compiler/Makefile \
        doc/Makefile \
        doc/babel101/Makefile \
        doc/manuals/Makefile \
        doc/html/Makefile \
        doc/papers/Makefile \
[..]
        share/Makefile \
        share/config/Makefile \
])
AC_OUTPUT
[...]
------------------------------------

It appears from some debug messages I inserted, that the argument to
AC_CONFIG_FILES is never extracted -- which is consistent with the
regular expression error above.  I tried several things to test this
out:

o moved the first Makefile to the same line as AC_CONFIG_FILES;
o removed the continuation characters and new lines;
o removed all but the first 4-5 files so the AC_CONFIG_FILES was on a
single line;
o verified no spaces after the "\"'s;

The third option was the only one that worked!  That is, it works if all
of the files fit on a single line so the closing paren is also on the
same line as the macro.  (No big surprise here, right?)

Unfortunately, we currently have 213 files that we want to pass.  Any
ideas for a work-around would be _greatly_  appreciated.

  Tammy