2013/9/23 Partha Bagchi <partha1b@...400...>:
I don't understand. Can you elaborate why you think the datadir should be set to "."?
On Windows, we do not rely on the MSYS approach of installing the application in a Unix-like directory structure. Instead, we put the "share" directory with all the datafiles in the same directory as the executable, and resolve the paths to files relative to the path to the executable. Setting INKSCAPE_DATADIR to "." allows the code in src/prefix.cpp to work correctly.
I purposely defined the datadir since the make install creates a folder called /opt/inkspace/share/inkspace/ and put all the files there. I figured that if I explicitly specified the datadir then perhaps it would create the share folder correctly.
The problem is not that the datadir is not created, but that Inkscape will never search it for files. The code for looking the up datafiles is different between Unix and Windows. The Windows version of this code looks for the share directory in the directory which contains the executable.
Allowing a functional copy of Inkscape to be built with Autotools on Windows will require some modifications to Inkscape source.
Regards, Krzysztof