Hi Hans, On Mon, 09 Apr 2007 16:03:11 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote: > Because of the integration of the dynamic chip support written by my students, > I've been taking a (much) closer look at lm-sensors userspace. > > The current makefile is broken for use by any serious distribution / any > distribution will need to patch it. > > Why? Well because of the abundant use of ":=" instead of "=" > > For example the Makefile says: > "PREFIX := /usr/local" > > Now when one wants an other prefix, normally in the build script for the distro > one would invoke make like this: > > make PREFIX=/usr > > however because of the unnecessary use of :=, this isn;'t work as := will > overwrite any environment / make commandline settings. This leads to distro's > using patches to the makefile like the one attached. Missing attachment. > Is it ok if I fix this in the 3.0.0 branch? I would need to be convinced that this needs to be fixed first. I wrote a minimal Makefile for testing purposes as follows: --- 8< --- PREFIX := /usr/local BINDIR := $(PREFIX)/bin all : @echo $(PREFIX) @echo $(BINDIR) --- 8< --- khali at hyperion:~/tmp> make /usr/local /usr/local/bin khali at hyperion:~/tmp> make PREFIX=/usr /usr /usr/bin khali at hyperion:~/tmp> This is with GNU make 3.81, but I also tested with 3.80 and 3.78.1 with the same result. So ":=" seems to allow variable value override from the command line just fine, and I fail to see why a distribution would need to patch our Makefile. In fact I just tried a "make PREFIX=/foo user_install" and it installed lm-sensors in /foo just fine. So what's the problem exactly? Checking the Slackware and openSuse lm-sensors package sources, I see that they do indeed patch our Makefile to change the prefix and other variables. But given my tests above, this seems to be by choice, and I doubt they would do it any differently if we were using "=" instead of ":=" in the Makefile. -- Jean Delvare
