autotools: fix subdir m4 check, never let it return -I

If BDB_CPPFLAGS returns only "-I", the next argument sent to the preprocessor
is treated as a path. There are 2 fixes here:

1. Check in CPPFLAGS, as a user might have manually passed a path to check.
2. Ensure the value is not empty before setting BDB_CPPFLAGS to "-I value"