I agree, it was an issue before 5.2 but now we have relocatable
installations. So it would be better to remove all the special casing
of mingw, except that (for backwards compatibility) on mingw bindir
defaults to $prefix instead of $prefix/bin. Then Joshua's usecase is
covered simply by --bindir=/mingw/bin.
Right. Removing the special case for MinGW would solve my problem and
be fine with me; the thing I don't know is if we need to preserve the
backward compatibility of forcing a specific "flat" layout in $prefix
when building for MinGW. There are basically 2 options I can see:
1) Add a flag to default MinGW to the "flat" layout, but allow it to
be overridden so that it can follow a normal layout (e.g. --bindir,
etc. are respected). This what my patch adds
2) Remove the special casing for MinGW entirely. A "flat" layout
would still be possible by doing e.g. "--bindir=$prefix
--datadir=$prefix ..." manually but it would no longer be the default.
I'm fine with either option, but I'm not familiar enough with the
project to be able to know which is better.