Re: [Plplot-devel] ocaml install dir

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On 2008-09-03 17:23+0100 Andrew Ross wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 07:58:01AM -0700, Alan Irwin wrote:
>> I think a good compromise here is to use "ocamlc -where" results but with
>> the
>> install prefix substituted for the system prefix.  IIRC, this is what we do
>> in the python case where we also have to deal with versioned and
>> distribution dependent install directories.
>>
>> The result would be $prefix/lib/ocaml/3.10.2 on Debian
>> and $prefix/lib64/ocaml on Fedora so both sets of packagers get the
>> right result automatically when $prefix is /usr, and users who want/need
>> a non-root install prefix are allowed to have one.
>
> Alan,
>
> Sounds like a good potential compromise. This is easy on UNIX where there
> is a default /usr prefix. How will this work on other platforms where we
> don't necessarily know what the prefix is, or even for cases where ocaml
> is installed in a non-standard location?

Well when I wrote the above I was thinking along the lines of a CMake regex
to find lib.*/ocaml.* in the directory string and replace everything above
that with the installation prefix.  That would certainly work in the above
two cases.  I cannot guarantee it will work in all cases until we get more
user feedback.  Of course, there is also the alternative of creating a CMake
option to install exactly in the location given by ocamlc -where.  If you
prefer that optional approach to the regex approach, that is fine with me.

To answer your question about overriding cached variables versus uncached
variables using -D options, my own opinion is that is problematic because I
believe the behaviour changed somewhere late in the 2.4.x series or between
2.4.8 and 2.6.0, and I think the behaviour also depends on whether you
provide a variable type to the the -D option or not.

Therefore, I think we should deal with this issue explicitly rather than
asking the user to override certain CMake variables with -D options.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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