no DESTDIR changes please (was: Re: Core-utils 7.2; building only 'su')

[Steffen Dettmer]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 12:16 AM, Bob Friesenhahn
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Apr 2009, Douglas Held wrote:
>
>> Well, you would just change autoconf so that it fails fast when its
>> configuration is not "well formed"...
>
> How would autoconf know that?

Also, automagic things that work in most cases fail in a few...

I would not like `fail fast on old packages'. I understand that for
people building linux packages, which often may change quickly and be
well maintained, this might be desirable. Simple mature packages,
however, in the past already needed some changes just because of
autoconf improvements (new errors get detected), which might not be
good in any case. I use autoconf also to compile libs for embedded
devices. On those packages sometimes not even make install works :-)
(I know that this is not what autoconf is for and that we use it
wrongly etc, but I like autoconf because it can be used in a simple
way - in the end configure is just a shell script - and its most
flexible build tool I know :)).

If you need some "configure && make && make install DESTDIR=" on win32
why not having a wrapper that aligns --prefix of configure? On win32
things are strange anyway. You cannot have a absolute PATH in Makefile
(because of colon) etc pp
If you like, you can cross compile under linux for win32 (with e.g.
gcc-mingw32 or WINE + $CC) - DESTDIR will work :-)

I'm not sure about the details, but those annoying drive letters may
not be needed on win32 always, sometimes UNC pathes like
//myhost/windows/temp and so on may work. On cygwin the path mapping
can be really painful. On MinGW, you usually use /c/windows/tmp which
works with DESTDIR (in same way as on unix except of course that you
get a directory called like a drive letter, which shouldn't be a
problem).

oki,

Steffen