keeping $exec-prefix et al unexpanded

[Philip Willoughby]

I've been thinking (shock!), and it seems to me that it wouldn't break
anything majorly if we did expand all the $prefix-dependant variables.  The
reason being, practically everyone uses automake these days, and automake
defines all installation paths to be prefixed by $DESTDIR, which is empty
by default.

Since the only reason I've been given to keep the variables unexpanded is
so that you can do:

./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make prefix=/tmp/usr install
cd /tmp
tar cfz binary-tarball.tgz usr

this seems to me to be a bit of a redundant feature.

Regards,

Philip Willoughby

Systems Programmer, Department of Computing, Imperial College, London, UK
-- 
echo address@hidden | tr "bizndfohces" "pwgd9ociaku"

Why reinvent the wheel? . . . . . . . . . Because we can make it rounder...