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It is presumably introduced by https://github.com/netwide-assembler/nasm/commit/8453bcfa6c9dd94ab3aad458f11739c491ff27cd and https://github.com/netwide-assembler/nasm/commit/b6151260a1d09a2e98f4d9074080e89fb6b3aa98 I found that trying to set up compilation of 2.16rc10 rejected our server's autoconf 2.69, stating that it requires autoconf 2.71. I worked around this by downloading the most recent autoconf release from GNU, then setting it up with ./configure --prefix=... && make && make install. From https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.71.tar.xz
Unfortunately this is a bit of damned if you do-damned if you don't kind of thing. I can't easily test with autoconf 2.69, and there are a fair number of differences between 2.69 and 2.71, some of which are highly relevant. Since the configure script is pre-generated in the source code release files, I opted for 2.71 as it doesn't affect people building the release files. So yes, it's rather unfortunate but intended.