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

[David Lawrence Ramsey]

John M. Gabriele wrote:

<snip>

> 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...)

See below.

<snip>

> 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

Okay, I think I finally understand what you mean about a separate build
directory.

> 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.

For all directories in which things are installed, yes, but nothing is
installed in ${sysconfdir}.  If you want to add files to it, you'll have
to make it yourself.

<snip>

> 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)?

Yes.

> 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?

It would be useful for the above reason, but complicated to implement. 
And it's not a matter of setting --prefix.  For example, if you don't
build nano with --disable-nls, all the .po files are updated as part of
the build, so that the .gmo files generated from them later are up to
date.  What should be done then?  And how do you get gcc to put its
object files in a different location from the source files during the
build?

It's an interesting idea, but due to the above issues, it's not suitable
for 1.3.12.  However, 1.3.12 should be out in the extreme near future,
and I can look into it afterwards.  Thanks for bringing this up, in any
case.