A configure annoyance

[Tom Yu]

>>>>> "John" == John Hascall <john at iastate.edu> writes:

John> It is somewhat annoying that whatever DIR you use
John> for the library install path 
John> (   --libdir=DIR)
John> (or --exec-prefix=DIR/lib)
John> (or --prefix=DIR/lib)

John> is what ends up in the 'rpath' with no way to 
John> specify something else.

John> It would be really nice to be able 'make install' everything
John> into some random directory tree for packaging to other systems
John> w/o having to choose between having a wrong rpath or having it
John> want to overwrite the production locations on the build machine.

Is there a problem with using --prefix to specify the intended
destination where the package will install and using
'make install DESTDIR=...' to install into a temporary directory for
creating a package?