'make' loops forever during normal compilation

[GoogleCodeExporter]

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Run ./configure && make
2. Watch it loop through the same few hundred dependency checks forever
3.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
Finish compiling

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
7.4 Latest commit from today. 

Please provide any additional information below.
I waited about 40 mins to compile and it was still checking the same 
dependencies. I'm on redhat with an i7 cpu. 

Original issue reported on code.google.com by corn8...@gmail.com on 29 Mar 2014 at 12:44

[GoogleCodeExporter]

What was the situation before you started?
Did you do "make distclean" first?
Did you start with a clean setup or did you build before?
How did you get the files?

Original comment by brammool...@gmail.com on 29 Mar 2014 at 11:52

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I did try it with make clean, and make distclean first as well. I don't think 
the make part should be checking dependencies as all right? That should only 
happen with ./configure right? I got the files by just clicking download zip on 
the Google code page on the main branch. When I downloaded the src of the 
stable 7.4 from the vim website I can compile it fine. 

Original comment by benhg...@gmail.com on 29 Mar 2014 at 9:07

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I encountered the same problem (Scientific Linux). Stable 7.4 compiled fine as 
well.

Original comment by jonathan...@gmail.com on 13 Jan 2015 at 3:16

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I posted this (http://vi.stackexchange.com/q/3188/2009), and I think my problem 
was similar, perhaps identical to this problem.

After some hours forgetting that I was compiling vim over ssh, I found that 
compilation steps were repeated just right after some messages concerning 
timestamps of config.h and config.cache. 

What caused my problem was wrong timestamps. When I unzipped the archive that I 
downloaded from here, the modification dates of those files were something like 
1953 or 2092, neither makes sense. The thing is, configure files had different 
timestamps, and some of them had far too recent--I mean, like near 
22-century--timestamp. 
This rendered Makefile confused that, I am not sure, it repeated configuration 
step all over again.

How did I compiled my Vim? I had two machines available. Both of them had 
identical version of Vim sourcecode, and the problem was not reproduced on the 
second machine. I checked the timestamps on the second machine, and they were 
also somewhat arbitrary, but all consistent, and did not violated *causality*.

So, on my problematic machine, I just scp-ed all *extracted* source codes from 
another. Those codes are identical, except for the timestamp! And it was 
compiled without any problem.

So, my suggestion: I am not good at Unix system, so I don't know whether this 
is problem of the compressed archive or specific problem to this source code, 
but making sure that extracted files have correct timestamps will resolve this 
issue. 

Original comment by stp...@gmail.com on 8 May 2015 at 8:35