This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Rudi Cilibrasi. Original Post: Ruby extconf.rb compatilibity with autoconf Feed Title: Esoteric Ruby Blog Feed URL: http://cilibrar.com/~cilibrar/erblog.cgi/index.rss Feed Description: A weblog made to explore some Ruby ideas in great detail and try to work out ideal solutions to real problems. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Rudi Cilibrasi Latest Posts From Esoteric Ruby Blog

I have made a software packagae, complearn-0.6.2.tar.gz ,
that uses autoconf and automake to manage system configuration. One of the standard options is:

In many autoconf or automake enabled software packages written in C (such as GNU / FSF utilities) this creates subdirectories like

and so on for many common naming conventions.

Unfortunately I cannot understand how to correctly pass this option on to ruby mkmf:

I have seen that there is an option to make using
a DESTDIR variable such as:

but then this creates deep directory structure

and to me it seems that the /usr/local portion of the above path structure is redundant. Is there a way to remove it in the ruby mkmf extconf.rb structure? The best I can come up with so far is to use an mv and then an rm command to correct things, and this seems somewhat complicated and error-prone.

Is there a better solution to this problem?