Tom, I like your fix in configure.in better than adding a silly Makefile�rule. Yours is much cleaner. You just
createdan expanded_libdir in configure.in and let that be expanded in the *.in files. Great.
The problem with solutions like this is that we end up proliferating
expanded and unexpanded versions of the same variables; hence,
maintenance problems with coordinating the various uses of this
information.
We've already had this discussion with some of the other cases (the
perl or tcl interfaces come to mind but I'm not sure). It would be
unfortunate to make configure that much more complex when we don't
really need to at all. It seems we should be using Makefile rules to
do what they are best at: automatically generating files based on
known rules that depend on a specific database of local configuration
options; configure's role should simply be to create that database.
Cheers,
Brook