Re: gettext

[Russ Allbery]

Alfred M Szmidt <address@hidden> writes:
> Russ Allbery <address@hidden> writes:

>> If I built something to use /afs/example.com/sw/@sys/usr/local as its
>> prefix and want to install in /afs/.example.com/sw/@sys/usr/local,
>> which is a common thing to want to do with AFS since the former is a
>> read-only path and the later is a read/write path, I can't do that with
>> DESTDIR.

> You should have made the prefix to be /usr/local and then used
> DESTDIR, like this:

Your recommendation requires that everyone have /usr/local symlinks so
that the package can find its files.

> If you use DESTDIR/prefix the way it is supposed to be used then things
> work quite flawlessly.

The way that prefix is supposed to be used is that it can be changed at
install time to install into a different path.  DESTDIR does not do the
same thing.  Switching from prefix to DESTDIR requires changing the
structure and layout of large-scale software installations, something that
is often not desirable to do.  It isn't that difficult to continue to
correctly support prefix per the GNU Coding Standards, so that's what I'll
continue to ask people to do.

As mentioned, the last time I checked, libtool correctly supports this
even on platforms such as HP-UX where the binaries have to be relinked
after installation, although sometimes you have to run make install twice
and populate the final destination paths with the library files in-between
if you're doing a fresh installation.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>