should aclocal warn when picking up installed macros???

[Peter Johansson]

Hi,

I just helped a co-developer who experienced a mysterious

autoreconf: Entering directory `.'
autoreconf: configure.ac: not using Gettext
autoreconf: running: aclocal --force
autoreconf: configure.ac: tracing
autoreconf: configure.ac: adding subdirectory c++ to autoreconf
autoreconf: Entering directory `c++'
autoreconf: configure.ac: not using Libtool
autoreconf: running: /opt/local/bin/autoconf --force
configure.ac:43: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_MSG_FAILURE
      If this token and others are legitimate, please use 
m4_pattern_allow.
      See the Autoconf documentation.
autoreconf: /opt/local/bin/autoconf failed with exit status: 1


Line 43 in c++/configure.ac contained

YAT_CHECK_YAT([0.9.1], [], [AC_MSG_FAILURE([no yat found])])

which is a macro defined in c++/m4/yat.m4. After some investigation I 
realized the problem is that aclocal doesn't find 'yat.m4' and adding

ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I m4

in c++/Makefile.am solved the problem as expected. The annoying thing is 
that I did not see this problem because my aclocal finds yat.m4 under 
/usr/local. I'm not sure what I'm asking for here, but it would be nice 
if I could have aclocal complain somehow in this scenario. Is it 
possible to tell aclocal to only pick up local files that it can 
m4_include into aclocal.m4? Only time I really wanna pick up installed 
m4 files is when I issue 'aclocal --install -I m4', or am I misusing 
aclocal?

Thanks,
Peter