subdir-objects & depcomp trouble

[Patrick Guio]

Dear all,

I experienced some problems recently using the "subdir-objects" option of 
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE when creating a library in a different directory than 
the source files directory.

configure.ac contains the following line
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([1.6.3 subdir-objects foreign])

The "src" directory contains C++ header and source files and 
until recently I was compiling the files there using Makefile.am

Now I decided to have a "lib" directory for libraries and wrote an 
adequate Makefile.am.

The problem is when running configure and executing depfiles commands

> config.status: executing depfiles commands

There seems to be a string quotation problem and it creates the 
dependencies files into the directory 
lib/\$\(top_srcdir\)/src/.deps/

together with the following definition in lib/Makefile.am
libmylib_la_SOURCES = $(top_srcdir)/src/myfile.cc

Then make does not find the dependency file .Plo (or .Po if not using 
libtool) in ../src/.deps

Sincerely,

Patrick