I recieved replies from Tom Blinn and B. Thomsom, both at DEC, who 
pointed out that the problem was with doconfig failing, not btcreate.
I ended up logging a call with Digital Support, who were able to recreate 
the error in some situations. This perplexed my contact for a short 
while.
The problem was eventually identified as using the wrong version 
of make. I'd installed a copy of GNU make as make, higher up the path 
than the shipped Digital make. Revoved the GNU make and the initial 
reported problem was solved.
Bob
On Thu, 9 Apr 1998, Bob Parkinson wrote:
> Dear All,
> 
> This is on a new (unpatched yet) du4.0d alphaserver1200.
> 
> Trying to make a boot tape, using btcreate from the command line
> fails.
> 
> The error line is:
> 
> Makefile:834: *** Recursive variable `target_machine' references itself 
> (eventually).  Stop.
 
Received on Thu Apr 30 1998 - 11:11:10 NZST