bug#9026: Supporting $ACLOCAL_PATH?

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

On an FHS-style system, all macros are picked up from
/usr/share/aclocal.  Conversely, on a Stow/Nix-style installation,
macros are to be found in /foo/automake/share/aclocal,
/bar/guile/share/aclocal, /baz/pkg-config/share/aclocal, etc.

It seems to me that the latter calls for user environment-specific
settings, which an $ACLOCAL_PATH environment variable would handily
support [0].

WDYT?

Bruno rightfully noted the importance of having a reproducible way of
producing tarballs, and user-specific environment settings appear to go
counter this goal.  However, there will always be a need for this kind
of setting on Stow/Nix-style systems, AFAICS.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

[0] In fact Nixpkgs/NixOS has a wrapper around ‘aclocal’ that does
    exactly this (see
    
<https://svn.nixos.org/repos/nix/nixpkgs/trunk/pkgs/development/tools/misc/automake/builder.sh>.)