Buggy invocation of emacs during "make"

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

I have complained about this before. But each time I
fix it, the fix is permanent for that machine so I forget about it
until the next time.  Today I was trying to install on a machine
for which I don't have root access, and I was majorly annoyed
trying to work around this bug.

Problem:
The normal build process fails because it tries to write to
a non-existant directory that seems to have something to
do with emacs.  I don't use emacs; I don't want emacs;
and I don't want my gnuplot installations to fail just because
emacs isn't there.

Actually it's worse than that.
Installing emacs does not fix this problem, because
(a) the directory is looked for in the wrong place, and
(b) a normal user does not have write-access to it

The long and short of it is that the Makefile created
in the .../docs directory tries to execute this command:
   /bin/sh ./../mkinstalldirs /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp
during a normal "make".  It shouldn't do that.

I have:
	autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.59
	automake (GNU automake) 1.8.3
I also have
	GNU Emacs 21.3.2

emacs has a directory /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp
(*not* /usr/local/...) but it belongs to root

I append the output from "make check"

moraig [31] make check
Making check in config
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/merritt/cvs/gnuplot-cvs/config'
make[1]: Nothing to be done for `check'.
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/merritt/cvs/gnuplot-cvs/config'
Making check in m4
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/merritt/cvs/gnuplot-cvs/m4'
make[1]: Nothing to be done for `check'.
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/merritt/cvs/gnuplot-cvs/m4'
Making check in term
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/merritt/cvs/gnuplot-cvs/term'
make[1]: Nothing to be done for `check'.
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/merritt/cvs/gnuplot-cvs/term'
Making check in src
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/merritt/cvs/gnuplot-cvs/src'
make[2]: Entering directory `/home/merritt/cvs/gnuplot-cvs/src'
make[2]: Nothing to be done for `check-am'.
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/merritt/cvs/gnuplot-cvs/src'
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/merritt/cvs/gnuplot-cvs/src'
Making check in docs
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/merritt/cvs/gnuplot-cvs/docs'
Building allterm.h
gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I.. -I.. -I../src -I../term -I/usr/X11R6/include -I/usr/local /include -Wall -g -O2 -DALL_TERM_DOC -c ./checkdoc.c
gcc -Wall -g -O2 -L/usr/lib64 -L/usr/X11R6/lib64 -o checkdoc checkdoc.o termdoc.o -lm 
spaces-only line :2975
PASS: gnuplot.doc
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/merritt/cvs/gnuplot-cvs/docs'
Making check in lisp
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/merritt/cvs/gnuplot-cvs/lisp'
/bin/sh ./../mkinstalldirs /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp
mkdir -p -- /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp
mkdir: cannot create directory `/usr/local/share/emacs': Permission denied
make[1]: *** [install-els] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/merritt/cvs/gnuplot-cvs/lisp'
make: *** [check-recursive] Error 1

-- 
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center
Mailstop 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195