* Nick Bowler: > 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 I'm not convinced that this covers that particular corner case (build at install time using a prefix setting that is different from configure time). Thanks, Florian
