Re: hardcoded prefix in aclocal

[Brian Cameron]

Jim:

> No.  IMHO it should not do that.
> If it does that, then the binary will work differently depending
> on where it resides when you run it.  That will cause grief for some
> installations.  For example, if I currently configure each new version with
> --prefix=/whatever/autoconf-$(date +%Y-%m-%d.%Hh%M) and install,
> then simply create links to /whatever/autoconf-$(date +%Y-%m-%d.%Hh%M)/bin/*
> from some directory in my path, my method will no longer work because
> the script will determine where to look based on $0 rather than on
> the prefix specified at configure-time.
> 
> Why not just use aclocal's `-I include_dir' option?

Since calls to automake are often buried, it would be time consuming to
find & fix all places where this issue is a problem.  We are using automake
to build the 40 or so packages that make up Gnome, so finding each place
where I need to add an '-I' is prohibitive.

Would it be reasonable for automake to check two default directories,
the "$prefix/share/autoconf" and the "$0/../share/autoconf" directories.
In other words (-I '$0/../share/autoconf') would be assumed.  This way
autoconf will work in any reasonable environment where symbolic links
are being used.

Aside from the hack I applied, I can come up with other workarounds
(like installing all the packages that put things in share/autoconf)
in a single directory and using the default prefix value.  However
automake would be more powerful if it had a general solution that
works well in different situations.

Brian