Comment 16 for bug 1079938

Okay, I've found the real cause of the issue. It's due to some differences between debhelper and rpmbuild:

**On Ubuntu:

Take a look at /usr/share/perl5/Debian/Debhelper/Buildsystem/autoconf.pm (Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/WozcJoe.png )

Notice how debhelper passes '\${prefix}' directly to ./configure.

**On Fedora:

Take a look at /usr/lib/rpm/macros (Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/Gm4Dd2q.png )

Notice how rpmbuild parses '%{_datadir}' to '/usr/share' before passing to ./configure.

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In short, Ubuntu's build process runs "./configure ... --datadir='\${prefix}/share' ..." whereas Fedora runs "./configure ... --datadir='/usr/share'"