I changed the $INSTALL_ROOT/etc/ files to $INSTALL_ROOT/share/, which is proper for anything where $INSTALL_ROOT doesn't equal '/'. If this is the case we need to install and be able to retrieve those files to/from $INSTALL_ROOT/usr/share/.
I have no idea how to do this with qmake, without a bunch of coding. For a hint, we may want to look at Qt-Creator to see how they are handling that.