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. _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
