GNOME_MAINTAINER_MODE_DEFINES sets a whole bunch of FOO_DISABLE_DEPRECATED defines, but this is now considered old-fashioned and lame, because it means every module in jhbuild breaks every time you deprecate something.

The cool kids are now using versioned deprecations. See, eg, http://developer.gnome.org/glib/stable/glib-Version-Information.html#GLIB-VERSION-MIN-REQUIRED:CAPS. gtk also has this (GDK_VERSION_MIN_REQUIRED), as does libsoup (SOUP_VERSION_MIN_REQUIRED) in git master. I'm not sure if any other libraries have ported over to it yet.

The trick here though is that you need to know what version to define as the required one, so you can't just have a single "dumb" configure macro like GNOME_MAINTAINER_MODE_DEFINES. There are various possibilities... you could key off variables with standardized names like GLIB_MINIMUM_VERSION, or else provide a wrapper around PKG_CHECK_MODULES that inserts FOO_VERSION_MIN_REQUIRED macros in as well...