I'm working on a Python/C++ application that will run on Mac OS and relies on the Festival Speech Synthesis System, which I'm building from source here. In my project, I use Festival's shell-based API (i.e. calling compiled executables from within my app to perform tasks). I'm having issues compiling a portable build of Festival that I can ship around to other (Mac OS) machines. My issue is specifically with absolute paths; I can compile successfully with ./configure then make, but the resulting executables reference absolute paths on my system. Obviously transferring or shipping this build to other machines results in errors since those paths don't exist.
I'm looking for a way to create portable, standalone executables of Festival (on Mac OS). Is this an issue with how I'm compiling? Is there some default switch I can run at compile time to use relative paths, or would I have to edit the makefiles myself? I notice the top-level Makefile references a variable TOP that gets reused across other make files. It's declared as TOP=. but when I search the resulting build, I see that it's resolved to an absolute path on my system.
I'm not very deft with C compilers and I have the feeling I'm missing something obvious, since this must be a common task. Any advice would be much appreciated.