A newly installed CentOS 5.3 x86_64 machine, with a mostly unpopulated
/usr/local. gzip has never been installed under /usr/local, the
only gzip that exists is the local system one (/usr/bin/gzip, a link
to /bin/gzip).
I run:
./configure
gmake
gmake install
and it drops the install in /usr/bin. Starting on line 19611 of the
configure script, the prefix is changed based on where gzip is
currently installed. This is surprising and annoying behavior.
The configure script is explicit:
./configure --help
***
Installation directories:
--prefix=PREFIX install architecture-independent files in PREFIX
[/usr/local]
By default, `make install' will install all the files in
`/usr/local/bin', `/usr/local/lib' etc.
***
Thanks to this errant behavior (off the top of my head, I know of no
other GNU program that does this), I'm going to have a bit of manual
undo to do. I can force the build to do what I want with:
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
but dear me, I shouldn't have to.
Could you please either document this behavior and change the output of
./configure --help or remove the check completely? It makes no sense
to change the default install location based on where gzip is found.
Cheers,
Zube
