Re: Some problems packaging libobjc2 version 1.6

[Richard Stonehouse]

On Tue, Mar 06, 2012 at 12:21:12PM +0000, David Chisnall wrote:
> On 6 Mar 2012, at 10:31, Richard Stonehouse wrote:

[...]

> > 2.  When building using the Makefile, rather than the GNUmakefile,
> >   the DESTDIR variable is not honoured. DESTDIR is important for
> >   building packages. I think the attached patch overcomes this
> >   problem.
>
> This is a very ugly patch.  It seems to duplicate the functionality of the 
> PREFIX macro, but by scattering references to it everywhere rather than just 
> using them in the one place where they're required.  make PREFIX=$DESTDIR 
> should do what you want without this.

Not necessarily, in general. make install into a staging directory, 
say, /tmp/Buildroot, by setting the prefix to /tmp/Buildroot/usr, 
would put the files in the right places relative to the staging 
directory; so they would end up in the right places when the resulting 
package is installed to /. However it has the danger that any absolute 
paths contained in any of the files will start with /tmp/Buildroot/usr 
rather than just /usr, which is going to cause trouble when the pakage 
is installed to /. This is, I think, the problem that DESTDIR was 
invented to solve. DESTDIR was intended for a different purpose from 
PREFIX - see:
<http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#DESTDIR>
for the GNU people's story on this.

However, my patch was wrong; it should have changed the absolute 
symbolic links (which also cause problems in package building) into 
symbolic links. Revised patch attached.


--
    Richard Stonehouse

libobjc2-1.6-honour_DESTDIR-2.patch
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