Re: separating source and install name

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Perrog,

* Perrog wrote on Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 09:04:57PM CEST:
> Is there a special reason $program_transform_name macro is limited to
> PROGRAMS primitive, and lack parallells to LIBRARIES and DATA?

`info Autoconf "Transformation Rules"' has a partial answer to this:
|    Whether to do the transformations on documentation files (Texinfo or
| `man') is a tricky question; there seems to be no perfect answer, due
| to the several reasons for name transforming.  Documentation is not
| usually particular to a specific architecture, and Texinfo files do not
| conflict with system documentation.  But they might conflict with
| earlier versions of the same files, and `man' pages sometimes do
| conflict with system documentation.  As a compromise, it is probably
| best to do name transformations on `man' pages but not on Texinfo
| manuals.

Of course, for libraries there is a completely different reason:
the library namespace is restricted by interdependencies[1].  Parallel
installations of libraries with the same functionality are often done
by installations into different libdirs, or different prefixes.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ralf

[1] Example: package P builds libraries libA and libB, the latter
depending upon the former.  With shared libraries, the name of libA will
usually be hard-coded into libB.  Play the same game with installed
libraries, and there is little point in renaming them at `make install'
time.