Re: Autoconf versions: srcdir either relative/absolute

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Justin,

* Too, Justin A. wrote on Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 12:51:54AM CEST:
> I have the build trees for a few projects (don't know what version of
> autotools they used), but I notice that srcdir varies.  From my local
> tests, it looks like newer versions of Autoconf set srcdir to be an
> absolute path, is this correct?  Also, in which version of Autoconf
> did this change occur?

1) If you use
  ../src/configure

then srcdir will be relative.

2) If you use
  /absolute/path/to/configure

then srcdir will be absolute.

3) If you pass --srcdir=... to configure, it will be, well, whatever you
passed.

4) If you use
  `pwd`/configure

then old Autoconf versions would set an absolute srcdir, while newer
ones try to be smart and set srcdir to '.'.  Same happens in (3) if the
passed name happens to resolve to '.'.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ralf