Unable to override value of AR set by gnulib macro?

[John W. Eaton]

GNU Octave's configure script used to allow users to set AR using

  ./configure AR=...

but that stopped working recently.  It looks like the problem is the
following change to gnulib:

  
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=2b14869442bce932cf1d805387928484d4914d59

Since this change was intended to improve support for Minix, could it
at least be limited to Minix systems?

Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that it would be
better to allow the user to set AR and ARFLAGS from the environment
and only set default values if these variables are not already set.

jwe