Re: [wxhaskell-users] Re: [Haskell] Announce: wxHaskell 0.6

[Matthew W. <ma...@al...>]

Daan Leijen wrote:

> You don't have to do that. If you give "--prefix" to configure it will 
> work fine.
> You can also give "--libdir" explicitly. When you specify "--help" at 
> the end of
> the options, you get a nice overview of all settings that will be used.

That works for some packages but we can never be sure it will work for 
all, because quite a few programs and libraries encode run-time paths in 
their binaries based on the settings of prefix and related such options 
given to configure. Because we ultimately want the build system to 
install it to a different place to the place it will actually be run in, 
that can cause serious problems.

Can you guarantee that wxHaskell does not have any such 
compile-time-encoded paths in it?

A common solution is an install target allowing specification of a 
target directory to be used instead of /. Thus you might invoke

make DESTDIR="/var/lib/portage/work/wxHaskell-0.6.0/image/" install

and Portage will copy that tree into / after the install's been 
determined to be successful. It also records files and mtimes and things 
at this point for uninstallation at a later date.

I may be wrong, but I believe the GNU autotools make this kind of thing 
quite easy to do these days.