Subject: bug#61828: aclocal warns when specifying the m4 macro dirs through AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIRS

From: Karl Berry <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2023 14:39:05 -0700

Hi Bruno,

    I don't understand what's happening in the 'aclocal' program. 

Me either.  Sorry to be such a failure as a maintainer, but it's not
like I've ever looked at that program, or could do so any better than
you.  Any chance you could check into it and maybe find a patch for the
undesired/incorrect warning?

     "- The special make variable ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS is deprecated; future
        Automake versions will warn about its use, and later version will
        remove support for it altogether."

FWIW, I personally have no intention of ever warning, let alone
removing, ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS. Doing so would cause endless trouble with
little benefit, as far as I can see.  Not that I control anything, but
since that message has been there for 10+ years and nothing has been
done, I guess whatever problems it was seen to cause are not
insurmountable. I changed the wording in NEWS to be closer to the
wording in NEWS-2.0, which talks about a warning, but not removing. (2.0
itself is fully mythical, as far as I know.) --thanks, karl.