Paul D Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> %% Russ Allbery <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> ra> DESTDIR is unusable for this purpose, because DESTDIR would attempt to
> ra> install into /afs/.ir/pubsw/Development/autoconf-2.13/usr/pubsw/bin.
> ra> That's wrong. That's not the structure of our package volumes. And
> ra> there's no way of telling DESTDIR to do the right thing without changing
> ra> where autoconf expects itself to be after it's installed.
> Either I misunderstood what you said, or that's not quite right.
I think we're on the same page and I just phrased it wrong.
> DESTDIR is added as a prefix to every _installation_ path, but it's
> never used to modify any hardcoded directories. That is, if you run
> "./configure; make; make install DESTDIR=/foo" then everything will be
> installed into /foo/usr/local _but_ any paths hardcoded in the
> application (including shared library search paths, etc.) will still be
> looking at "/usr/local", not "/foo/usr/local".
Right; the point was just that this always gives .../usr/pubsw, so if you
want to get rid of the /usr/pubsw part, you'd have to change prefix, but
that defeats the whole point of using DESTDIR in the first place.
> I can see that you are getting extra levels of directory you don't want,
> and I'm not saying we should punt $prefix (in my experience more
> packages actually support overriding $prefix correctly than support
> DESTDIR correctly...) I'm just clarifying what DESTDIR does.
Right, understood. The parenthetical is also a big part of my point;
DESTDIR is an infrequently exercised feature (see recent discussion of
this in gnu.misc.discuss of all places) and often there are various bits
of the package that don't properly install relative to DESTDIR like
they're supposed to.
(BTW, on this general subject, I'll take this opportunity to publically
complain about the internationalization message catalogs in nearly every
GNU package that I've run across, which rather than obeying the setting of
--datadir like they're supposed to instead *hard-code* $prefix/share in
the Makefile. Grr. Some of us don't *like* share, libexec, com, and all
the rest of these annoying and mostly useless variations on a perfectly
good lib directory; I can understand supporting them for people who care,
but please let us turn them off.)
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
