On 05/06/2020, Florian Weimer <fweimer@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > * Nick Bowler: > >>> It would like to get config.status expansion going, among other things. >>> It's nice to consolidate these things in a single place, and avoid >>> scattering such constructs and several places. >>> >>> What do you think about this? >> >> Autoconf is to be used as part of build systems that comply with the GNU >> coding standards and these standards say that the user can set prefix >> etc. >> on either the make command line or the configure command line. >> >> In other words, the following should produce a working installation >> (assuming a clean build): >> >> ./configure >> make prefix=/some/where install >> >> Substituting installation directories into C source files at configure >> time is probably not going to work in this case. This is why the manual >> recommends using make rules to do it. > > For the install target, the prefix= setting should not trigger > recompilation and thus does not affect what gets baked into binaries. > Instead, it should only affect installed paths. The config.status > approach makes it more likely that this happens. Hence why I stated the assumption of a clean build where the "install" target will also build the package, since I didn't want to worry about this detail in a simple example. > I can't find a reference that you should be able to specify prefix= on > the make command line for a non-install target. GCS 7.2.5 "Variables for Installation Directories"[1] Installers are expected to override these values when calling make (e.g., make prefix=/usr install) or configure (e.g., configure --prefix=/usr). [1] https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Directory-Variables Cheers, Nick
