Re: automatic setting of srcdir

[Lars J. Aas]

On Sat, Nov 04, 2000 at 07:48:33PM -0600, John A. Crow wrote:
: All -
: 
: I am using autoconf-2.13. 
: 
: It looks to me from my experiments that by default the srcdir 
: output variable is set to its relative path name. That is, if I do
: 
:    ./configure
: 
: I will get @srcdir@ replaced with "."; if I do for example
: 
:   ../testdir/configure
: 
: I will get @srcdir@ replaced with "../testdir".
: 
: Is there any way to force this variable to be replaced with
: its absolute path name? I have seen this happen elsewhere
: with the configure script for finger.
: 
: Any guidance will be appreciated.

The person running the configure script can invoke /absolute/path/to/configure
instead of ../relative/path/to/configure.  If this isn't good enough (don't
understand why you need absolute paths, though), you should be able to set up
configure.in like this to force $srcdir to become an absolute path:

AC_INIT(whatever)
my_ac_builddir_save="`pwd`"
cd "$srcdir"
srcdir="`pwd`"
cd "$my_ac_builddir_save"
[...]

  Lars J