Re: guile & automake

[Rob Browning]

Marius Vollmer <address@hidden> writes:

> I would say that it is not in general OK for a package to install
> things under a different prefix than it was configured with.

Though it is *very much appreciated* when packages are written so that
"make PREFIX=`pwd`/debian/tmp` install" works.  You don't need to be
able to run the package from the non --prefix dir, but being able to
install it somewhere else temporarily makes life *much* easier on
packagers like Debian (and I'd assume RedHat).

> Yes.  When Guile is installed by a distribution into /usr, I'd say it
> should have /usr/local/share/guile (etc.) in its search path by
> default.
>
> Rob, should we add that to README-PACKAGING?

Perhaps, though don't many other packages do that unconditionally?
(i.e. look in /usr/local as well as /usr)

I'd need to think about this a bit, but if we were going to look in
/usr/local/, I suspect we'd probably want a bit more sophistication,
perhaps adding both /usr/local/share/guile/<VERSION> and
/usr/local/share/guile in that order.  In theory, this would allow
people with r5rs stuff to put it in /usr/share guile, and people with
version dependent stuff to put it in the right subdir.

Working on a Debian Guile Policy's been on my todo for a bit.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org, @linuxdevel.com, and @debian.org
Previously @cs.utexas.edu
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