ACLOCAL_FLAGS

[Sam Thursfield]

Hello!
Here's something I've not found really discussed anywhere so far,
which I find kind of surprising. Would you accept a patch which made
'autoreconf' honour an 'ACLOCAL_FLAGS' variable?

I ask because I'm working on jhbuild (GNOME build script tool). Most
autogen.sh scripts run 'aclocal $ACLOCAL_FLAGS', and so jhbuild sets
this environment var - using it so autoconf macros that have been
installed by packages in its sandbox directory are visible to
subsequent packages it's building.

Now some autogen.sh scripts are changing to just run 'autoreconf' and
that breaks this behaviour. I can't see any easily solutions other
than what I proposed, modifying autoreconf to take an env var
'ACLOCAL_FLAGS' into account .. it's great that autogen.sh scripts are
becoming wrappers around autoreconf (since otherwise, there's no point
having autoreconf :) but without an easy way of passing the m4 include
path there's no point. Running 'autoreconf -I
/home/sam/prefix/share/aclocal' doesn't work by the way, I assume this
alters the path for some other components.

Thanks for input on this!
Sam