Hello Mark,

	disclaimer: I'm not a Guile maintainer, just giving you my personal
	opinion here

> Consider an Autotools project that eventually wants to install some Guile
> modules in the system. The canonical way to do this seems to add
> GUILE_SITE_DIR to ...

> However, this doesn't honor --prefix settings; in particular, make
> distcheck fails for non-root users; see here for a general discussion:

The guile.m4 macros are not meant to (and shouldn't) honor variables such as
--prefix, that is the responsibility of the (autotool based) project author. The
guile.m4 macros and variables that it defines provide (and meant to only provide)
information about 'the Guile' that is 'visible' to your project (at configure and
make time ...).

There are solution though, here is an example of what I do [1].

> P.S.: There is one more issue with guile.m4: When it finds the program
> guile-2.2, it only searches for guild-2.2, but not for guild. However, at
> least on Ubuntu systems, there is only guild, but no guild-2.2.

That is expected, because 'guild' could point to 'another Guile' ... either it is an
Ubuntu problem, either guild was not properly post-fixed as requested, not sure, one
would have to check ...

HTH,
David

1]	http://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/guile-lib.git/tree/

	[ see the configure.ac, Makefile.am and am/guile.mk ...
	[ I suggest you clone and try it (you'll need to run ./autogen.sh first)
	[ try with no option, then only using --prefix, then using both --prefix
	[ and --with-guile-site=yes