I don't have a *really* strong opinion against it.  It's just that I find the current plethora of configuration flags to be non-intuitive and confusing (and there are plenty of open issues agreeing with that sentiment) and adding another with the name CFLAGS_NODIST doesn't help.  But, again, short of someone going in and doing a radical simplification of the whole configure.ac, Makefile.pre.in, and setup.py tangle, I guess exposing one more variable isn't going to make matters that much worse than they already are and it does solve a real problem.  (Sorry to vent on your patch, Stefan.)