I've encountered this feature in a few other packages, and offer it as a humble suggestion. A trivial patch to configure.ac:
--- orig/configure.ac Fri Nov 18 23:55:49 2005 +++ configure.ac Wed Feb 1 09:55:31 2006 @@ -74,7 +74,11 @@ AC_SUBST(GETTEXT_PACKAGE) AC_DEFINE_UNQUOTED(GETTEXT_PACKAGE,"$GETTEXT_PACKAGE",[Translation domain used]) dnl Add the languages which your application supports here. -ALL_LINGUAS="am az be ca cs da de el es es_MX et eu fr ga gl hu it ja mk nb nl nn pa pl pt pt_BR ru sk sl sr sr@...428... sv tr uk zh_CN" +if test "x$ALL_LINGUAS" != "x"; then + ALL_LINGUAS=$ALL_LINGUAS +else + ALL_LINGUAS="am az be ca cs da de el es es_MX et eu fr ga gl hu it ja mk nb nl nn pa pl pt pt_BR ru sk sl sr sr@...428... sv tr uk zh_CN" +fi AM_GLIB_GNU_GETTEXT
AC_PATH_PROG(PKG_CONFIG, pkg-config, no)