AC_OUTPUT to parent dir and install-sh

[Willem Jan Palenstijn]

Hi,

Is it allowed to list files in the parent directory of the
main source directory in AC_CONFIG_FILES? I'm trying the following small
example configure.ac:

AC_INIT(testcase, 0.0.1, address@hidden)
AC_PROG_INSTALL
AC_CONFIG_FILES([test ../test_parent])
AC_OUTPUT


When I use autoconf-2.63 with this, and run the resulting configure
script, and there is no 'install' program in $PATH, the script
'./install-sh' is used as $INSTALL. In the 'test' output file, @INSTALL@
is then correctly replaced by './install.sh'. However, in
'../test_parent' @INSTALL@ is replaced by '.././install.sh', which does
not exist.

At a cursory glance, it seems config.status is counting slashes in
'../test_parent' and concluding test_parent is in a subdirectory of the
source directory.


Is this expected behaviour? I couldn't find any reference in the
autoconf documentation or on the mailing list to this case, but I may
have overlooked it.


Should it be useful, I prepared a small tarball with the example
configure.ac and the other necessary files at
http://www.usecode.org/misc/autoconf_parent_output.tar .



Aside: this issue popped up when building the Singular
( http://www.singular.uni-kl.de/ ) mathematics package which uses
autoconf. It uses multiple configure scripts, one of which is in one
subdirectory of the root and generates a Makefile in another
subdirectory of the root. It was encountered by a Sage (
http://www.sagemath.org ) developer who was building a patched Singular
as part of Sage on a Solaris machine that did not have an 'install'
binary.



With kind regards,
Willem Jan