From bug# 23074: "autogen.sh calls a number of autotools commands, and aborts if those fail, but it does not tell theuser who run autogen.sh that it aborted. The attached patch slightly improves autogen.sh."

This was included in 2.1 and 2.0. However it was not pushed into 1.8. If it is trivial to do so, can we include this in 1.8? It makes figuring out why builds failed a little easier for those situations when autogen calls a tool that itself fails which in turn causes autogen to fail.