This seems to be because the parameters to mkinstalldirs are not correctly quoted in the makefile (as far as I can see). I've stopped investigating here as I originally wanted to make the build process of another open source project space-in-path-safe to ease the experience of new contributors. I'm fairly fit in shell, but I give up here as I don't want to investigate the autohell that somehow seems to cause this. This behaviour was seen in the version downloaded from http://pkgconfig.freedesktop.org/releases/pkg-config-0.23.tar.gz
Unfortunately, this is a common autotools bug and there's not an easy way to workaround it at the pkg-config level. In current pkg-config, this fails with libtool failing to quote the args correctly. /bin/sh ./libtool --mode=install /usr/bin/install -c pkg-config '/home/dan/scm/pkg-config/build/dest/p a t h/bin' libtool: install: /usr/bin/install -c pkg-config /home/dan/scm/pkg-config/build/dest/p a t h/bin/pkg-config /usr/bin/install: target `h/bin/pkg-config' is not a directory make[2]: *** [install-binPROGRAMS] Error 1 make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/dan/scm/pkg-config/build' make[1]: *** [install-am] Error 2 make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/dan/scm/pkg-config/build' make: *** [install-recursive] Error 1 This is automake-1.11.1 and libtool-2.4. Possibly this is fixed in newer versions, but I suspect it won't happen based on the libtool developer's stance: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-automake/2007-10/msg00005.html I did actually find the spot to fix this in libtool, but I see lots of other areas where this would need work. grep for func_show_eval and see that the args are almost never properly quoted.
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