In the current head (r11835) the following steps: ./autogen --prefix=/tmp/gs make install end with this error: cp: cannot create regular file `/usr/lib/cups/filter/#inst.5439#': Permission denied
I believe the current behaviour is as intended and is correct. The configure script interrogates the cups-config utility to find the directories to which to point the cups utilities install. If setting "prefix" overrides the path returned by cups-config, I feel the results could be problematic. Also, we cannot reliably combine the prefix path with the path from cups-config (it always returns a full, absolute path - it doesn't have an option for "path relative to...."). Unless any interested parties have any bright ideas, I'm going to close this as invalid. NOTE: in the soon to be committed fix for Bug 691956, we will not try to install the cups tools unless that is requested, so the error in this report will no longer happen with a default build.
IMHO the correct solution would be to provide a --with-cups-serverbin option to override "cups-config --serverbin".
Suggested solution (along with the implicitly required "--with-cups-serverroot" and "--with-cups-datadir" options), committed: http://git.ghostscript.com/?p=ghostpdl.git;a=commit;h=5e6871 It's not quite fixing the reported problem, but the change for Bug 691956 was committed earlier.