I believe it is a bug if it is not possible to run 'make distcheck' without first running 'make'. At least in the automake based projects which I usually work with this is possible. Also the folks at #autotools on IRC seem to aggree with that:

    <lanoxx> is it required to run 'make' before 'make distcheck' or is 
             it a bug it make distcheck fails if 'make' has not been run before?
    <pehjota> lanoxx: Sounds like a bug in the package, like it's trying
              to distribute files that are generated at build time. [...]

I was told on #gtk that it is the case for all project which use yelp (or gtk-doc), that they have to run 'make' first followed my 'make distcheck'.

I would like to ask that either:

 * yelp-tools is fixed. Probably this requires some change in yelp.m4?
 * Or if it requires a change in each of the project, that this is probably documented somewhere. Possibly here [1].

Please don't argue that is easily possible to just run 'make' first. When one forgets this or does not know about it, then its not very obvious what when wrong and 'make distcheck' will just output an error that looks like this:

make[3]: Entering directory `/home/sebastiangeiger/Documents/Code/gnome-applets/drivemount/help'
cp: cannot stat ‘./ca/index.docbook’: No such file or directory

This leaves it to the developer/user to guess that he forgot to run 'make'. But my first guess what that I forgot to add some important configure options or that some required tools where missing.

Thank you for your time.

 [1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Yelp/Tools/yelp.m4