First point; underquoted seems to be a made up word under quoted is okay and under-quoted works but underquoted not found in dictionaries to date. Whine done.
I have had similar experiences with macros in older .m4 packages and it seems that newer or different autotools do not like the way the macro is constructed (it worked fine until autotools was updated) the simplest solution is to edit the macro definition and make it be quoted the way autotools wants. If you are distributing a package you might even toss the newer version in or; even write a little text on how-to. Many persons who use free software just want to ./configure, make, (skip make check) make install and forget about any cleanup in their anxiety to use the software. And if asked they probably don't know how to fix a warning or an error. Many end users are not programmers of any kind. I use software to create art, still, motion and web. I have learned (taught myself) how to find and fix the errors or warnings that come up. This is no simple task, I recently rewrote the imlib.a4 and aa-lib.a4 because I want to use their capabilities in my tweaking and experimentation. It took a while to figure out the problem and just as long to learn how to fix it. I have not sent my changes to GNU because I do not feel programmer-like. But my software compiled and worked beautifully after I fixed it. imlib.a4 and aa-lib.a4 are short and sweet but fixing the underquoting for an experienced programmer should be a walk in the park. Then you upload the changes to GNU. David
