Re: [Rdkit-devel] [PATCH 2/2] Install libraries in ${RDKit_LibDir}

[Greg L. <gre...@gm...>]

Dear al,

On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 10:41 PM, Gianluca Sforna <gi...@gm...> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 9:20 PM, Greg Landrum <gre...@gm...> wrote:
>>
>> A comment about the way this is going: it currently seems to be pretty
>> easy to get a system-wide installation (i.e. something in /opt or
>> /usr/local), which is great of packaging. But as a developer, I would
>> like to be able to have multiple copies of the code, so it would be
>> very nice to have current (trunk) "make install" behavior available:
>> i.e. copy the binaries back up into the current source tree. I will
>> look into this a bit over the next couple of days, but if anyone has
>> tips on how this can be accomplished I'd love to hear them.
>
> I don't know if that's easily doable. However, rdkit is the only
> project I worked on with a that kind of behaviour for "make install";
> how exactly is that useful to you?

That's an easy one. There are several reasons:
1) I typically have several different versions of the RDKit active at
any one point on a machine (last release, current synced trunk copy, a
branch, the copy I'm working in, etc.). It's very convenient to be
able to switch between these purely via environment variables.
2) for people who just want to try the software out without having to
globally install anything, it's nice if there's a method for building
and installing that doesn't require a system directory.
3) while doing development it's nice to have the svn checkout of the
python files together with the built .so files.

The first two of these are theoretically possible with the current
packaging branch, but involve directory names like
~/RDKit_test_install/lib/python2.6/dist-packages. The last doesn't
really work at all.

I just checked in a change on the packaging branch that, I believe,
allows the old behavior again: if the cmake variable
RDK_INSTALL_INTREE is set (it is not by default), then "make install"
will show the original behavior (it will install things in the source
tree). Please take a look and see what you think.

Best Regards,
-greg