Why is srcdir passed as .

[Ben Woodard]

I am having a problem with my configure script where when configure is
called for the subprojects a parameter --srcdir=. is passed into them
when I just do configure. I expected that the srcdir would be ".." I
dug around in aceneral.m4 and found that it is quite deliberate. Why
is it done like this?

In autoconf 2.13, acgeneral.m4 line 2558 it has:

    case "$srcdir" in
    .) # No --srcdir option.  We are building in place.
      ac_sub_srcdir=$srcdir ;;
    /*) # Absolute path.
      ac_sub_srcdir=$srcdir/$ac_config_dir ;;
    *) # Relative path.
      ac_sub_srcdir=$ac_dots$srcdir/$ac_config_dir ;;
    esac

I don't see why you special case out ".". When I cut out that special
case. Things still seem to work. Is there some case that I'm not
testing in which this would cause problems.

-ben