Hi Paolo, The goal of your patch appears to be to make it possible for a package to enable relocatable installation by default. I see three problems with this:
1) This choice should be an installer's choice, not a program developer's choice. Why? Often a package A depends on a package B which depends on a package C etc. In order to install package A relocatable, B and C must also be installed relocatable. But B and C most likely will not have relocatability enabled by default. 2) Security considerations: The doc/relocatable.texi file mentions that for security reasons, when a relocatable installation is chosen, --prefix needs to be chosen in a particular way. With your patch, when gl_RELOCATABLE_DEFAULT is invoked, you have an insecure installation by default! 3) Platform dependencies are ignored here. But while --enable-relocatable is cheap on Linux systems, it is expensive on other platforms: each of the installed executables is invoked indirectly through a "trampoline executable". This doubles the number of fork+exec calls. The programmer who chooses gl_RELOCATABLE_DEFAULT should be made aware of this downside. (Documentation) Bruno
