Re: [Nano-devel] building from cvs, Debian Stable, README's

[John M. Gabriele]

--- David Lawrence Ramsey <address@hidden> wrote:

> John M. Gabriele wrote:
> [snip]
> 
>  > By the way, it seems to make sense to have a separate build directory,
>  > so folks can "diff -r" the original source dir with their own without
>  > hearing about all the build files present. So, I added some
>  > instructions about that to the README.CVS file as well as made a few
>  > formatting changes too which you might take or leave. Also added a
>  > small note to README. (see attached patches)
> 
> Applied with a few tweaks, and minus the separate build directory
> information for now.  Setting the prefix to "/home/you/opt/local" will
> just hardcode that path into the executable,

Right. So it looks in /home/me/opt/local/share/local and
/home/me/opt/local/etc/nanorc ... (hmm. Whoops. I don't have an etc
directory in there. Maybe I should make one...)

> and unless you really want
> nano to look for e.g. its global nanorc file in /home/you/opt/local/etc
> (assuming you've also set the sysconfdir to /etc instead of leaving it
> at its default of ${prefix}/etc), I don't think it's the right solution.

I've gotten into the habit of keeping an ~/opt directory around. It's
used to build and install software in, often for experimental stuff when
I don't want to use /usr/local (or, say, if I'm on a system where I don't
have root access).

This tree in my home directory ends up looking like:

~/opt
   |- big_app_1
   |- big_app_2
   `- local
        |- bin
        |- include
        |- info
        |- lib
        |- man
        |- share
        `- src
            |- nano
            `- nano_mine

I've never set a "sysconfdir", and have always just assumed that
a /home/me/opt/local/etc dir would get created by the "make install"
step if some program needed it.

> If I understand you correctly, building nano with the prefix set to
> "/usr", and then running
> 
> make install DESTDIR=/home/you/opt/local
> 
> might be what you need.

Just curious, if you don't use a separate build directory, then when
you generate a patch ("diff -ur nano nano_mine"), wouldn't you get a
bunch of messages in there about build files existing in nano_mine but
not in nano (presuming you haven't done a build in the nano directory)?

It had never occurred to me to use a separate build directory until
I'd read about it in the GCC build instructions. I guess they seemed
to make a good case for keeping your source directory clean, so I
used it elsewhere sometimes too. What do you think of the usefulness
of using a separate build directory?

Thanks,
---John


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com