Re: Add redirection to "install" for package managers

[Mike Frysinger]

On Friday 06 February 2009 18:55:15 David A. Wheeler wrote:
> Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > simply fixing said package sounds saner to me ...
>
> Absolutely!  But when I go to package something else, I find the same
> problem.  And the next one.  And the next one.  And the next one.
>
> Whenever I find myself doing the same thing repeatedly, I try to find a
> way to automate it.  Clearly, training developers to use DESTDIR isn't
> working; that convention is ancient history.  So let's automate the
> problem away, at least for a common case.  That's my theory, anyway.

*shrug* seems to be working for us in Gentoo.  people generally seem willing 
to accept patches.

>  > cp and mkdir and .... you suggesting those be changed as well?
>
> That would be a possibility, but I also understand why that kind of
> invasive change would be strongly resisted.  I will probably just create
> "bogus" versions of those programs which do the redirection, and put
> them at the front of the PATH.
>
> I could create a bogus version of install, too. But in the case of
> install, its SOLE purpose is to install files.  It seems odd that
> install can't automatically handle this common case.  Also, mucking
> around with install means that even someone who invokes /usr/bin/install
> will get the redirection.

i imagine if you started your own package in this regard, people would use it.  
a set of utilities (just wrapper shell scripts) that respect some magic env 
var and automatically provide DESTDIR-like support when people want to do 
`make install` on a bad package.
env WRAPPED_DESTDIR=... PATH=~/make-install-wrappers:$PATH make install

hopefully you dont encounter too many install systems that also mung up the 
PATH and dont respect DESTDIR ;)
-mike

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