Autoconf has nothing to do with the port/package infrastucture, which are perl scripts and the scaffolding for about 5000 applications. Autoconf is used by many ports, however -- there are ten incompatible versions of autoconf in the ports tree and metaauto to support the selection of the appropriate one -- but autoconf, where used, was a selection by the application developers, who prefer GNU-style configuration and build tools.
As BSDfan666 suggests, you are free to set environment variables as you desire, when importing code from-the-wild. My intent was to indicate where you could go to learn how it's done for properly ported X applications.
|