How do I fix a broken Lisp directory path for Emacs?

Question

I installed a new version of emacs (new for me). I didn't want to overwrite the stock copy so I put it in a group-readable directory ~admin/sw. I point my $PATH there and I'm able to pick it up, but when I run ~admin/sw/bin/emacs I get a whole bunch of warnings and errors:

Warning: arch-dependent data dir (/usr/local/libexec/emacs/23.1/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/) does not exist.
Warning: Lisp directory `/usr/local/share/emacs/23.1/site-lisp' does not exist.
Warning: Lisp directory `/usr/local/share/emacs/23.1/lisp' does not exist.
Warning: Lisp directory `/usr/local/share/emacs/23.1/leim' does not exist.

When I compiled emacs I did it as: make install prefix=~admin/sw. All of those directories do exist but they exist at ~admin/sw/share/...

How can I configure my environment so that emacs looks there for the files? Thanks!

Answer 1

Rather than

make install prefix=~admin/sw

try:

./configure --prefix=~admin/sw
make
make install

This may require an absolute path.