Re: automake-1.7.3: single test failure on NetBSD 1.6, and autoconf-2.57

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Thanks for the further explanation of the "make -e" interaction with
the setting of prefix in the environment.

I can easily remove the setting of prefix in the build environments,
which presumably will make the automake tests succeed.

The confusing point is that CC, CXX, CFLAGS, ... etc all carry over
from the environment into configure scripts.  From the end user's
point of view, why should prefix be treated any differently?  Perhaps
it is that you can set it with --prefix=/some/dir.

At present, the autoconf manual does not list prefix in the
Environment Variable Index, suggesting that prefix is, in fact, not
imported.  The code in configure scripts from autoconf-2.57 looks
first in the file defined by the environment variable CONFIG_SITE,
then in the setting provided by the --prefix=xxx option, and then
falls back to the GNU default of /usr/local.

This confirms your recommendation of using something like this in the
user-specific site configuration file:

        test "$prefix" = NONE && prefix=$HOME/`arch`/local

I'll make suitable changes in my build scripts.

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