To all who said that Ruby Forum was a good idea (and all who said it
wasn't, and all who said nothing) : please help.

Unanswered question from http://www.ruby-forum.org/bb/viewtopic.php?t=53

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I have made a software packagae, complearn-0.6.2.tar.gz , 
that uses autoconf and automake to manage system configuration. One of
the standard options is: 
./configure --prefix=$HOME/wherever/placetoinstall 

In many autoconf or automake enabled software packages written in C
(such as GNU / FSF utilities) this creates subdirectories like 
$HOME/wherever/placetoinstall/bin for executables 
$HOME/wherever/placetoinstall/lib for libraries 
$HOME/wherever/placetoinstall/man for manual_pages 

and so on for many common naming conventions. 

Unfortunately I cannot understand how to correctly pass this option on
to ruby mkmf: 
ruby extconf.rb 
make 

I have seen that there is an option to make using 
a DESTDIR variable such as: 
make DESTDIR=$HOME/wherever/placetoinstall 

but then this creates deep directory structure 
$HOME/wherever/placetoinstall/usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/CompLearnLib 

and to me it seems that the /usr/local portion of the above path
structure is redundant. Is there a way to remove it in the ruby mkmf
extconf.rb structure? The best I can come up with so far is to use an mv
and then an rm command to correct things, and this seems somewhat
complicated and error-prone. 

Is there a better solution to this problem?