Hi Fabrizio - unfortunately, your examples work for me, in that I can run, in the proj/ directory, either ./configure --with-mylib=../lib or ./configure --with-mylib=/abs/path/to/autotool-bug/lib
and then make, in either the proj/ directory or the proj/src subdirectory, and it all completes successfully. All this with both your tarballs. So I remain unclear as to what you're doing. Sorry. Since configure is run in the proj/ directory, not proj/src, it seems evident that any method, absolute or relative, which specifies mylib to be the ../../lib directory cannot work, because that directory will not exist relative to proj/. Can you tell me exactly what commands you are running, starting with tar xf <tarfile> (and which <tarfile> to use), to see the problem? Just one sequence to reproduce the problem is enough. a wrong directory: proj/src/home/fabrizio/test/lib/.deps In any event, this blind concatenation of paths surely looks wrong. Maybe if the path (whatever it is) is absolute, the concatenation should be avoided. Unfortunately, I cannot discern where the computations are happening, whether it's somewhere in the depcomp script or the Makefile that's calling it. In addition, I agree with Hans-Bernhard that using a directory outside of top_srcdir is not exactly supported, although evidently it works in some cases. Even if it cannot be handled properly, perhaps a real error message could be given, or at least the deficiency documented. Thanks, Karl