Re: gettext

[Russ Allbery]

Stepan Kasal <address@hidden> writes:

> and what about this:

>       mkdir -p /tmp/destdir/afs
>       ln -s /afs/.example.com /tmp/destdir/afs/example.com

> You can save the local disk space.

Yeah, I understand, you can work around it.  I can make do with only
DESTDIR if I have to.

Here's the thing that I'm really annoyed about:  It used to be that a lot
of packages didn't support changing prefix at install time.  Changing
prefix at install time *completely* subsumes setting DESTDIR; it is in
every respect more powerful.  You can do everything that you can do with
DESTDIR and other things as well.  And there are a number of us who
install a lot of software in ways that one has to use kludges for with
DESTDIR but which work smoothly with changing prefix.

So some of the institutions that use prefix in that fashion have been
sending in patches for things to fix that support in various packages for
years, and it's gotten much better.  Now it by and large just works, there
was a lot of discussion on the automake list that resulted in a conclusion
that automake should support it, there was general agreement that it was
implied by the GCS, and everything seemed to be going quite well for us.

Now we're back to hearing "that's not supported and you never should have
been using that."  I'm sorry to have such a strong reaction to it, but
that really gives me something of a WTF feeling.

I also don't understand where this is coming from, since the last time I
looked at libtool in detail, it *did the right thing*.  It encodes the
paths into the .la files during build time and doesn't change them at
install time, and links against the correct final paths even when you
change prefix.  So I don't at all understand what the motivation for
dropping install-time prefix support was.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>