Works great manually, makepkg doesn't errors out

Question

I'm working on building subversion, I've modified and stock PKGBUILD a little but as it stands it won't work. Here is part of the PKGBUILD, very plain:
./configure --prefix=/usr --with-apr=/usr --with-apr-util=/usr --with-zlib --with-neon=/usr
make || return 1
make DESTDIR=$startdir/pkg install || return 1 # won't make it past here
Now the annoying thing is, if I cd src/subversion-x.y.z and run this:
make DESTDIR=/var/abs/testing/devel/subversion/pkg install
it works great, puts the files where they're supposed to be and is fine. Obviously the install part is returning a code somewhere that makepkg thinks is an error but how do I go about finding where and fixing it? echo $? after makpkg fails shows the exit code of whatever (I'm no pro at this) is '2'. Here are the last few lines of output from makepkg:
/var/abs/testing/devel/subversion/src/subversion-1.3.1/ac-helpers/install-sh -c .libs/libsvn_fs_fs-1.lai /var/abs/testing/devel/subversion/pkg/usr/lib/libsvn_fs_fs-1.la
/var/abs/testing/devel/subversion/src/subversion-1.3.1/ac-helpers/install-sh -c .libs/libsvn_fs_fs-1.a /var/abs/testing/devel/subversion/pkg/usr/lib/libsvn_fs_fs-1.a
ranlib /var/abs/testing/devel/subversion/pkg/usr/lib/libsvn_fs_fs-1.a
chmod 644 /var/abs/testing/devel/subversion/pkg/usr/lib/libsvn_fs_fs-1.a
libtool: install: warning: remember to run `libtool --finish /usr/lib'
Where about should I start looking for a way to fix this? Sorry if this is a noob question but I shell is not something I have my head around yet very well
Thanks

Answer 1

always use relative paths such as
make PREFIX=$startdir/pkg/usr install
can you post the complete PKGBUILD?