You only need to apply DESTDIR if you are using custom installation rules
Yes, I noticed that behavior and wondered about it. I don't recall
seeing it documented anywhere, so I was unsure about when the DESTDIR
prefix was required and when it got automatically applied. Thanks for
clearing that up.
However, the cause of your issue is lurking elsewhere. One of the checks, "make distcheck" executes, basically is
make prefix=<somewhere>/_inst install
This requires you to let $(WEBDIR) default to a directory containing $(prefix) in its root. For example you could use something similar to this in your configure.ac:
WEBDIR=${WEBDIR-\$(pkgdatadir)} AC_SUBST(WEBDIR,$WEBDIR)
That does the trick. I was becoming convinced that I'd have to get one of the built-in destination directories involved in the process somehow, but couldn't work out the approach to take. Thanks again.
One question though. Although this works, it uses the presence or absence of the WEBDIR variable to signal the difference between a "real" make install and a make install done as part of the make distcheck process. One consequence of this is that I can't provide a default value for WEBDIR, since that would override the use of $pkgdatadir.
It seems that it would be cleaner if I could test for a distcheck run and special case it. I tried the obvious but unsuccessful approach of checking for $dc_destdir:
- WEBDIR=${WEBDIR-\$(pkgdatadir)}
+ test "$dc_destdir" && WEBDIR=$pkgdatadir... but it seems that $dc_destdir doesn't get set when doing the ./configure step. Is there some variable or other test that can be used to determine when a make distcheck is being performed?
-- John Kodis.
