Re: Add redirection to "install" for package managers

[David A. Wheeler]

Okay, for the moment I'll try to do this DESTDIR redirecting WITHOUT a 
patch to GNU install.

I said:
> > 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.
>
> > ...  I will probably just create
> > "bogus" versions of those programs which do the redirection, and put
> > them at the front of the PATH.

Mike Frysinger wrote:
> 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

I hope so. I'll creating that package, including a script named 
"install", and see if I don't need to patch GNU install.  That'll work 
for many cases.  (I plan to use the environment variable is REDIR_DESTDIR.)

If it works EXCEPT that too many people invoke /usr/bin/install 
directly, then I'll gen up a modification of GNU install to do it, and 
return to this mailing list to pitch for it.

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

Agree :-).

--- David A. Wheeler