aclocal: can the "duplicated macro error" be made non-fatal?

[Dave Benson]

I am working on a packaging / publishing system [1]
based loosely on gnu tools (though it runs on non-gnu systems too).

It's primary feature is that you can install packages from
source in to a subdirectory.  As a generally rule, this works
nearly flawlessly, thanks principally to automake,
except for aclocal problems.   The biggest problem is:

  - the package has to live in a subdirectory, so
    `aclocal' with no arguments will surely miss the package's m4 files.
    But with the appropriate aclocal flags e.g. `-I /whatever/share/aclocal'
    if the user happens to have that package installed on the system
    (eg they have a /usr/share/aclocal/glib.m4
    and /whatever/share/aclocal/glib.m4) then aclocal doesn't
    produce any output, b/c of l.390 of aclocal:

            elsif ($map{$1} ne 'acinclude.m4' || $file eq 'acinclude.m4')
            {
                warn "aclocal: $file: $.: duplicated macro \`$1'\n";
!               $exit_status = 1;
            }

     I propose adding a --force flag to aclocal, then

!               $exit_status = 1 unless $force;

Shall i make a patch to that effect?

- dave

[1] http://wigwam.sourceforge.net/