[Zlib-devel] zlib-1.2.3-cos2

[Mark Brown]

On Sun, May 21, 2006 at 09:17:20PM -0700, Greg Roelofs wrote:

> > I'm not sure I understand. The way I see it, you're introducing an extra
> > symbol without solving any problem. (Is there any problem, at all?)
> > Why not just do "make install prefix=/my/prefix libdir=/my/libdir"?

> Here's the deal:  DESTDIR is solely for that--where the tree gets dumped
> on _this_ build.  prefix is for the final, intended install location AND
> for internal paths(!!!).  prefix often ends up both in generated makefiles
> and inside binaries.  DESTDIR never does.  They are not the same thing,
> and you cannot, in general, combine both of them into one variable.

To amplify, the reason people specify the root of the tree is that you
can wind up with a lot of different directories being used by some
software and it's a lot easier if you don't have to override them all
individually.  The reason you want specify the directories to use at
runtime separately to the directories where the package will be
installed by the build is that you might want the package build process
to place the program in a different location to the one where it will be
when it is run but some programs will contain hard coded paths to use
(for example, data files that need to be loaded at run time).

As a concrete example the Debian zlib packages are produced by
installing them into a directory within the build tree and then storing
the contents of that directory into package files.  When installed the
library ends up in /usr/lib.

-- 
"You grabbed my hand and we fell into it, like a daydream - or a fever."