Re: Buggy invocation of emacs during "make"

[Hans-Bernhard B. <br...@ph...>]

On Thu, 21 Oct 2004, Ethan Merritt wrote:

> 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.  

Actually, as you show later, it's not just writing to there, it's also
trying to *create* the directory.  So the above grief is somewhat beside
the point.

> Installing emacs does not fix this problem, because
> (a) the directory is looked for in the wrong place, and

Not really.

> (b) a normal user does not have write-access to it

That would seem to be your failure: /usr/local/bin is (supposedly) just as 
unwritable to ordinary users as /usr/local/share/emacs/... is.

> The long and short of it is that the Makefile created
> in the .../docs 

It's actually "lisp", not "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.

It should only do that in the 'make install' rather than plain 'make',
right.  But the above *is* the correct location, for a default
configure-driven install (prefix defaulting to /usr/local, not /usr).
And for an install where emacs is found to be present, this is supposed 
to be done.


-- 
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (br...@ph...)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.