Re: generating pc file

[David A. Wheeler]

Bob Friesenhahn:
> Yes.  The only make-time override which has any business being used as 
> part of a formal build process is DESTDIR used with 'make install'. 
> Anything else is a hack. :-)

You may think so, but this capability is a clearly-documented promised 
capability under the GNU standards.  And a lot of people support it.  I even 
have a lot of crufty sed invocations in a shell script written specifically to 
make this happen.

So either one of the following needs to happen:
1. The GNU standards need to be modified so that this is no longer the 
expectation, and that configure-time is enough.  I'm *okay* with that kind of 
change, but it needs to be actually changed, so that users know that this is no 
longer a reasonable expectation.
2. If the GNU standards stay as-is, the autotools need to make this easy to do, 
or many programs will continue to fail to do it correctly.

--- David A. Wheeler