Jan Danielsson wrote:
> my next guess is that my change to
> configure.ac will never do any good, because the configure merely *runs*
> the configure script, without actually generating it from the
> configure.ac file. ... Ergo, I need to run autoconf.

As they say in Sweden, "Ja, just det."  Exactly.  autoconf reads
configure.ac and generates configure.  

If I were tackling something like this, not knowing much about pkgsrc
internals, I'd develop my patches from the applications CVS tree or latest
tarball, outside pkgsrc.  Then, once I had a clean build and a running
program, I'd go back to figuring how to package it.  

But maybe there's an easier way....

Regards, 

--jkl