make tags bug (?)

[William Pursell]

I just downloaded the 2.2.9 tarball, and did a configure && make tags
and received the following error:

etags: Unknown option: -i

I'm not sure if this is an automake bug, or if I have a too-old etags
installed (in which case configure should have caught it and this
is an autoconf bug.)  I worked around this this by modifying the
Makefile to use --etags-include instead of -i.

Is this a bug, or should I be setting ETAGS when I make?

I'm running a mostly stock etch with:
$ etags --version
Exuberant Ctags 5.6, Copyright (C) 1996-2004 Darren Hiebert