On 14-Nov-2005, Quentin Spencer wrote:
| The RPM build system on Fedora (I don't know if this is true of other
| RPM-based distributions or not) provides a makeinstall macro for use in
| spec files that redefines prefix at install time to install the files in
| a temporary location. I didn't realize that this distinction between
| $prefix and $DESTDIR existed; thanks for pointing that out. I have
| modified the spec file to use DESTDIR instead of the makeinstall macro
| and it appears to avoid this problem.
I added DESTDIR to Octave's build files. I don't think it is
something you will find in all packages.
The GNU Make manual seems to imply that it is OK to change prefix at
install time. But I'm not sure how realistic that is. A complex
package that looks for files at run-time is probably not going to work
properly if you just change prefix when running make install, unless
you do what the package systems do and move the files back to the
expected location when installing the package.
Octave will allow you to change prefix at install time, but then you
have to set OCTAVE_HOME before running Octave, or it won't find
startup or other script files.