Re: Core-utils 7.2; building only 'su'

[Keith Marshall]

On Wednesday 15 April 2009 07:06:09 Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > > Not all packages follow GNU Coding Standards, therefore,
> > > DESTDIR is not properly supported in a surprisingly large
> > > number of packages.
> >
> > We already enforce a level of GNUism on packages that use
> > autoconf/automake, I do not think it would be the end of the
> > world if we did it in this case as well.
>
> This case is different.  DESTDIR has the important drawback that
> it does not work well with w32-style installation directory names
> like `C:/foo', because you cannot prepend to such a path.

Indeed.  DESTDIR is so conceptually broken in the w32 arena, that I 
will unconditionally reject any bug report relating to its absence, 
or *any* patch which attempts to add it for MinGW.

> So for maximum portability you should support this in your
> package, too.  BTW, why do you state that overriding just $prefix
> would be "almost always wrong"?

In the w32 arena, overriding $prefix at `make install' time is 
unilaterally *correct*.  Why can your staging area not mirror the 
structure of the eventual installation, with all alternative paths 
specified relative to $prefix, (as enshrined in GCS defaults)?  Do 
it sensibly, and you shouldn't need the DESTDIR kludge, so...

> DESTDIR can still serve as a more convenient way to override
> several installation directories at once (and it is necessary for
> a good experience for packages using libtool).

That's a pity.  Off topic for this list, perhaps, but doesn't that 
tend to negate usefulness of libtool, in the w32 arena?

-- 

Regards,
Keith.