revisit: bare carriage return in status.m4 / configure

[Steven R. Loomis]

Hello,
 autoconf 2.63 has worked well for our project (icu), except for an 
issue with a bare carriage return (hereafter '^M') in status.m4 which 
shows up in resulting configure scripts.  The line in question is:

ac_cr='^M'

If I am not misreading the git repository, the current development 
version also has such a line.

I found and read this discussion:  
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf-patches/2008-04/msg00007.html
but, most of the later discussion seemed to be about preferring \r in 
the output form over ^M.

This bare CR presents a potential problem and an actual one.

1. The potential problem is that configure could become mangled when 
transferred across systems with different line endings or platform 
encodings.

2. The current actual problem is that Subversion balks at merging the 
'configure' script, as having 'inconsistent line endings'.  

Are there any plans to change status.m4 so that a bare ^M doesn't show 
up in configure scripts?

Thanks,
Steven