Hello Adriaan,
* Adriaan van Os wrote on Fri, Sep 21, 2007 at 09:43:36AM CEST:
In Autoconf, in lib/autoconf/general.m4, there is a code fragment that
checks to "Be sure to have absolute directory names".
Yes. And that check is checking for a string that can easily be
detected as absolute directory name; not because the semantics of
a library installation directory may happen to be that way, but because
otherwise things like prepending DESTDIR won't work.
Therefore, the check for an absolute pathname for libdir in the above code
fragment is wrong.
No, this bug is a non-issue for Autoconf: it's not the right place to
change this.
For Libtool, matters are slightly different: Libtool has a limitation to
not allow relocatable packages (which is what you're after, after all).
This may be fixed eventually, but even in that case I don't think
--libdir @...
will be allowed for configure; instead, some other mechanism should be
employed. (Don't hold your breath, fixing this in Libtool is a lot of
work.)
Hope that helps.