Eric Blake wrote: > Well, that won't happen unless Keith starts a thread on the autoconf list > giving suggestions on how he thinks it can be fixed. Complaining on the > subscriber-only mingw is the wrong approach to get autoconf to even be > aware of his complaint or ideas for improvement (not that me replying on > the cygwin-patches list is any better ;)
IMO, he wasn't really serious about that "proposal" -- and even if it were, he wanted /me/ to run point on it, not himself. It was more of a "sure, I'll let you drive my car just as soon as you get a law passed by every country in the world and the UN, granting me personal ownership of the moon". Data point: even Keith's "proposal": > That said, I will offer you an > accommodation: you convince the automake maintainers to fix their > broken implementation, such that the paradigm becomes > > $(SYSDRIVE)$(DESTDIR)$(prefix)... > > and so forth, the autoconf maintainers to provide a standard macro to > set SYSDRIVE appropriately for native Windows hosts, and both to > promote the use of this paradigm among those projects wishing to > support DESTDIR, and I will withdraw my objection. won't solve the problem (for DESTDIR + mingw). We've (the mingw team) always recommended that users configure using "--prefix=`cd /posix/path && pwd -W`" under MSYS, which results in "$(prefix)=C:/mount/point/path" (I don't know what Keith uses for --prefix when configuring in his customary cross-build environment). So, even if SYSDRIVE itself is accommodated, you'd have to *rewrite* $prefix behind the user's back, removing its X: component if present. Plus, if $DESTDIR also contains a sysdrive, which one do you use? Either choice will cause problems... No way that sort of thing would fly with the auto* teams, and I reckon Keith knows that. Hence, not a serious proposal. IMO, his real goal is to "encourage" (force) everyone to stop using DESTDIR altogether. I admit, he has a point: the FSF only requires that 'make install prefix=/new/prefix' work; they impose no such requirement concerning DESTDIR -- probably because it just doesn't work on some platforms like mingw. But I object to the 'leveraging' he's using here: by refusing to allow DESTDIR in winsup/mingw, he makes it so that we (cygwin) might as well expunge DESTDIR from winsup/*/ entirely -- because DESTDIR is useless from $(build)/i686-pc-cygwin/winsup. But that's his unilateralism forcing /our/ decisions, and I object to that, without a more grounded reason than, as Ralf put it, "when users look at our (mingw's) makefiles, they might think it could work". -- Chuck
