Re: [un]install-*-local/install-*-hook does not honor DESTDIR

[Eugene Crosser]

Gentlemen,

I was almost ready to accept Alexandre's reasons, but recently I've run 
into another similar problem, where 'local' hooks where not involved. 
Allow me to argue some more for my proposal to use DESTDIR when running 
"make distcheck".  I believe that such change would make autoconf more 
useful.

Alexandre Duret-Lutz wrote:

>  Eugene> Because "install-*-local" is a natural place to play
>  Eugene> with files that are *not* located under $prefix
>  Eugene> (exactly as example in the documentation suggests), you
>  Eugene> may not want to put $prefix-dependant paths there.
>
> Actually I'd rather change the documentation and use another,
> better illustration for install-*-local.  Using hard-coded
> install-paths always seems an error to me.  (The actual example
> in the doc would be better written as `sysconf_DATA = afile'.)

I thought that install*local are specially designed to cover such cases 
when "proper" directory structure does not fit.  I imagine perfectly 
legal use of absolute paths, e.g., when you want to install a startup 
script into /etc/init.d/ & /etc/rcX.d/ or, say, a log rotation script 
into /etc/logrotate.d directory.  These locations are system-wide and 
have no relation to your package's installation prefix.

Another case when absolute paths may be legitimately introduced is when 
your package is a "plugin module" for another package that is already 
installed on your system.  For instance, you may be building a shared 
object that is going to be installed into location provided by *other* 
package (e.g. via <package>-config script or pkgconfig).  This needs to 
be independent of locally specified installation prefix; and currently 
it breaks "make distcheck".  If "make distcheck" used DESTDIR it would 
work fine.

>  Eugene> On the other hand, "make distcheck" configures the
>  Eugene> package with custom $prefix, and installs into that
>  Eugene> prefix, *not* specifying "DESTDIR".  So, if your
>  Eugene> *-local target deals with files that are not located
>  Eugene> under $prefix, "make distcheck" breaks.
>
> Yes.  If a user wants to install a package on his account, he
> will use something like `./configure --prefix ~/usr'.  However
> if `make install' tries to write to some hard-coded directory
> elsewhere the account, it will fail.  So `make distcheck' should
> fail too.

Again, I can see a perfectly legal case when system-wide --prefix is 
specified and then "make install DESTDIR=..." is run as *non-root*.  It 
is building of a package for some OS distribution.  A packager may want 
to run non-root for safety, and to be sure that nothing has been 
installed into a wrong location (outside DESTDIR).

Summary:
There are several reasons that are, in my opinion, quite legitimate, to 
re-do "make distcheck" target in such a way that it uses DESTDIR on 
"make install" and "make uninstall" runs, instead of specifying custom 
--prefix on "./configure" run.

Thank you

Eugene

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