While I agree I can avoid this problem with the acinclude.m4 approach, I'm hesitant to do so because it's a corner case we don't hit that often, I'd rather put my effort into a general fix for everyone.
I understand. OTOH, I can say that putting Nick's m4 magic into your acinclude.m4(s) would help move towards the general fix, since it would give us some real-world experience with that "error stub", to see if there are any unexpected problems. My perl skills are nearly zero This particular issue seems to be all about m4 and autoconf, not so much Perl :). Perhaps raising the issue on the automake mailing list I think everyone on the automake list who might actually do any work is also on bug-automake :). --thanks, karl.