This reverts commit c778945806.
I believe this is exactly what brings the staging branch into
the right shape after the last merge from master (through staging-next);
otherwise part of staging changes would be lost
(due to being already reachable from master but reverted).
I hate the thing too even though I made it, and rather just get rid of
it. But we can't do that yet. In the meantime, this brings us more
inline with autoconf and will make it slightly easier for me to write a
pkg-config wrapper, which we need.
