Re: gettext

[Russ Allbery]

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> writes:

> * The feature that you and Russ Allbery request cannot be implemented
>   on HP-UX, AIX and SunOS 4,

...with shared libraries.  With static libraries, it's fine.  Plus, this
isn't *entirely* true; the key point is that the installation paths not be
encoded anything, which is achieved already by libtool.

The problem of the relinking requiring the libraries already exist in the
destination location is present with both DESTDIR and prefix and therefore
is not a problem unique to prefix.

> * For other platforms, in particular Linux, it is implementable,
>   under two forms: "make install DESTDIR=..." and "make install prefix=...".
>   These two forms are equivalent, as you demonstrated through

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

That's obviously not equivalent.  It again requires an extra minor step
and requires people to change their build machinery from what used to
work.

That would still arguably be the right thing to do if make install
prefix=... required you to do some additional work.  But it doesn't.  It's
supported automatically by Automake, and was supported by previous
versions of gettext.

So I'll ask again:  why drop support for a feature that people use?

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