bug#9026: Supporting $ACLOCAL_PATH?

[Bruno Haible]

Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> ... having a reproducible way of
> producing tarballs, and user-specific environment settings appear to go
> counter this goal.

Not only that. Also, it is important for distributors to be able to
regenerate the 'configure' file of packages, for a variety of reasons.
They can only do so if the tarball contains the _complete_ source code
of the configure file, that is, all the .m4 files that were used to
create it, except the .m4 files of Automake and Autoconf.

Have you ever tried to rebuild the configure file of a package that
did not package pkgconfig.m4 or glib.m4? It's a nightmare.

Therefore, please don't encourage maintainers to omit nontrivial .m4 files
from the tarball. Adding support $ACLOCAL_PATH would do exactly that.

Bruno
-- 
In memoriam Jean Moulin <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Moulin>