How to disable Automake docs?

Instead of editing files, when I run make I pass the argument MAKEINFO

make MAKEINFO=true

It might not be obvious at first glance what this does.

It overrides the MAKEINFO variable predefined by GNU make, which normally points to the program to call in order to get makeinfo invoked. So by setting it to true you are effectively replacing calls to makeinfo by calls to /bin/true. This changes the makeinfo tasks into no-op actions that always succeed, thus allowing the whole build to succeed, rather than halting at makeinfo errors.

You can non-intrusively prevent building by making makeinfo a no-op. The easiest way so far I've found is to symlink a local makeinfo to true before building so that configure and make find that instead. I.e. you can do this:

ln -s /usr/bin/true makeinfo
export PATH=${PWD}:${PATH}