[Adonthell-devel] Unix and Non-Unix installs

[Kai Sterker]

I just spent a little bit of time on the OSX package, and that gave me
the following thought.

For a complete installer (Adonthell + Waste's Edge) it is much more
convenient to have everything inside one directory. That's what I'd call
a Non-Unix install, 'cause it's not the Unix way.

Anyway, I'm wondering whether our build system should be changed so that
one can decide between Unix and Non-Unix installations at configure
time. Of course, for some targets this would make little sense: Win32
would always be non-Unix, while Linux would always be Unix way. But for
BeOS and OSX, it would be a nice feature as well.

All we'd need would be a --enable-nonunix-install switch or something.
(--enable-single-dir-install might be better). Anyway, the configure
script would then set the DATADIR to "." and also define NON_UNIX or
SINGLE_DIR. In our code we could check for that instead of doing a 

  if defined (WIN32) || defined (__BEOS__) || defined (__APPLE__), 

which could get quite lengthy and also introduce errors.

Further we could adjust the prefix in case of a non-Unix install, so
that 'make install' puts Adonthell into a directory of it's own. Then
you can easily configure the data package --with-adonthell-binary and
point it to that directory. Then 'make install' will install the data
where we want it to go. All that remains is packaging and distributing
that directory.

Sounds, okay?

Kai