Understanding mkinstalldirs

[Marc Singer <elf at buici dot com>]

I'm building part of GPE that was recently updated to support
autotools.  The build process is failing because it cannot find
mkinstalldirs.  My exploration of the problem finds these facts.

  1) The configure scripts is looking in $ac_dir for mkinstalldirs.
     The command it wants to run is ./mkinstalldirs where the '.' is
     $ac_dir.  
  2) $ac_dir is set to '.' because install-sh is found in the source
     directory.
  3) install-sh is put in the source directory when automake -a is
     called.  It does not put mkinstalldirs there because, it seems,
     the file wasn't already there.

As this package was newly converted, I don't expect there to me
anything deprecated in the scripts.  The configure.ac file is small.

Any thoughts on this?

I'm using autoconf 2.59 and automake 1.9.5.


#                                               -*- Autoconf -*-
# Process this file with autoconf to produce a configure script.

AC_PREREQ(2.59)
AC_INIT(libgpewidget, 0.98, gpe@handhelds.org)
AC_CONFIG_SRCDIR([init.c])
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([foreign dist-bzip2])

# i8n stuff
AH_TEMPLATE([GETTEXT_PACKAGE], [Package name for gettext])
GETTEXT_PACKAGE=libgpewidget
AC_DEFINE_UNQUOTED(GETTEXT_PACKAGE, "$GETTEXT_PACKAGE")
AC_SUBST(GETTEXT_PACKAGE)
ALL_LINGUAS="cs da es ga id nl pt sk sv wa de fr hu pt_BR ro sr vi"

libgpewidgetlocaledir='${prefix}/${DATADIRNAME}/locale'
AC_SUBST(libgpewidgetlocaledir)

AM_GLIB_GNU_GETTEXT
AC_PROG_INTLTOOL([0.23])

# Checks for programs.
AC_PROG_CC
AC_PROG_LIBTOOL

#gtk-doc for documentation
GTK_DOC_CHECK(1.0)

# library dependencies
DEPS="gtk+-2.0 >= 2.4 glib-2.0 >= 2.4"

AC_ARG_ENABLE(cairo,
[  --enable-cairo         Enable using Cairo rendering toolkit],
[
        ENABLE_CAIRO=true
        DEPS="$DEPS cairo"
],
[
        ENABLE_CAIRO=false
])

PKG_CHECK_MODULES(GPEWIDGET, $DEPS)

if test x$ENABLE_CAIRO = xtrue; then
    GPEWIDGET_CFLAGS="$GPEWIDGET_CFLAGS -DHAVE_CAIRO"
fi

AC_SUBST(PREFIX)
AC_SUBST(CFLAGS)
AC_SUBST(CPPFLAGS)
AC_SUBST(LDFLAGS)

AC_CONFIG_FILES([Makefile libgpewidget.pc libgpewidget-uninstalled.pc doc/Makefile po/Makefile.in])
AC_OUTPUT