28 Aug
2009
28 Aug
'09
9:07 p.m.
Guido Scholz wrote:
DESTDIR usage is only for building packages; there is
no purpose for
someone bypassing his packaging system and installing it directly from
source to use this variable. But this procedure may be unhealthy.
DESTDIR is very useful for developers, too. It provides you with an easy
way to check your 'make install' target.
And it can be useful for end users as well. E.g., you might want to
first do a staged install to see what exactly gets installed and where.
(With simple packages, make -n install will give you that information,
but that's not generally true.) Also, I don't know how often I cursed at
a source package which provided no uninstall target; in that case a
staged install gives me the information I need to uninstall the package.
Source packages which provide neither DESTDIR nor 'make uninstall' can
be a royal pita to deal with, usually I won't touch them with a 5 foot
pole, except maybe on a "scratch" system that's hosed anyway.
So, DESTDIR is pretty much standard these days, it is easy to support
and makes developers, users *and* packagers happy, I think that every
source package should have it. :)
My 2c.
Albert
--
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email: Dr.Graef(a)t-online.de, ag(a)muwiinfa.geschichte.uni-mainz.de
WWW: http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag