I noticed this problem when adding systemd support to netcf, because I
setup the configure.ac to automatically prefer using systemd over
initscripts when possible - although I had copied the
install-data-local target from the example of libvirt's
"libvirt-guests" service more or less verbatim, "make distcheck" would
fail because it was trying to install the service file directly into
/lib/systemd/system rather than into
/home/user/some/unimportant/name/lib/systemd/system.

This is caused by the install/uninstall rules for the systemd unit
files relying on $(DESTDIR) pointing the installed files to the right
place, but in reality $(DESTDIR) is empty during this part of make
distcheck - it instead sets $(prefix) with the toplevel directory used
for its test build/install/uninstall cycle.

(This problem hasn't been seen when running "make distcheck" in
libvirt because libvirt will never build/install systemd support
unless explicitly told to do so on the configure commandline, and
"make distcheck" doesn't put the "--with-initscript=..." option on the
configure commandline.)

I verified that the same problem does exist in libvirt by modifying
libvirt's configure.ac to set:

  init_systemd=yes
  with_init_script=systemd+redhat

This forces a build/install of the systemd unit files during
distcheck, which yields an error like this:

/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 virtlockd.service \
  /lib/systemd/system/
libtool: install: warning: relinking `libvirt-qemu.la'
/usr/bin/install: cannot remove '/lib/systemd/system/virtlockd.service': Permission denied
make[4]: *** [install-systemd] Error 1

After adding $(prefix) to all the definitions of SYSTEMD_UNIT_DIR,
make distcheck now completes successfully with the modified
configure.ac, and the above lines change to something like this:

/usr/bin/install -c -m 644 virtlockd.service \
  /home/laine/devel/libvirt/libvirt-1.2.1/_inst/lib/systemd/system/