Installation dirs in code

[Brendon Costa]

Hi all,

I was wondering if there exists a kindof standard way to obtain final 
installation directory information within code being compiled when using 
autotools?

E.g.
I have a program that requires a configuration file that will usually go 
into the ${prefix}/etc as given by $sysconfdir. So this program needs to 
know where it is going to find this installed configuration file. I was 
initially going to export the evaluated value of $sysconfigdir into a 
define in config.h as an absolute path, however I found there are two 
problems with this.

1) On windows using MinGW/MSYS the path is not a native windows one but 
rather a MSYS path. So then i started to write a autoconf macro that 
converted a MSYS path to a native windows one.

2) I also often perform cross compiles as it is a whole lot simpler than 
rebooting into a different operating system. When doing a cross compile 
usually the installation prefix is not the name of the actual install 
path that will be used on the end system, but just some temporary 
directory that the binaries are compiled into before being copied across 
to the host system later. This gets even more complex with problem 1 
above when cross compiling on say NetBSD for a host system of 
i386-mingw32 as I cant convert the MSYS path to a windows native one 
without the build actually being done on the windows machine...


Is there a standard way of solving this problem or even just a method of 
doing things that will work in the above scenarios?

Thanks,
Brendon.