Ian Grant <ian.a.n.grant@googlemail.com> writes:

> I'm at a loss. I have libtool-2.4 installed in /usr/local and I get this
> error when 'make'ing after running
>
>     ../configure --prefix=/usr/local --libdir=/usr/local/lib \
>         --with-libreadline-prefix=/usr/local
>
> [.... making lots of stuff ...]
>
>   CCLD     libguile-2.0.la
> ../libtool: line 5989: cd: (libdir): No such file or directory
> libtool: link: cannot determine absolute directory name of `(libdir)'
> make[3]: *** [libguile-2.0.la] Error 1
> make[3]: Leaving directory
> `/home/ian/Documents/FP/guile-2.0.11/build/libguile'
> make[2]: *** [all] Error 2
>
> Another minor issue is that the configure script seems not to know about
> the readline-6.3 which I have installed in /usr/local:
>
> checking for rl_get_keymap... no
> checking for rl_getc_function pointer in readline... no
> configure: WARNING: *** GNU Readline is too old on your system.
> configure: WARNING: *** You need readline version 2.1 or later.

You should not have to set libdir when you set prefix.

I am unclear on --wtih-libreadline-prefix, but generally in the autoconf
world when prereqs are not in the standard search path, I invoke

  CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/pkg/include" \
  LDFLAGS="-L/usr/pkg/lib -R/usr/pkg/lib" \
  ./configure ....

So you may want to try that.  Another thing to do is to read config.log
to see what configure is doing.  It seems obvious that
--with-libreadline-prefix=/usr/local should cause the equivalent
CPPFLAGS/LDFLAGS to be used when looking for readline, and if found, to
be added, but perhaps something is amiss there.