On Sep 3, 2000, Richard Stallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Either that or one gives up on the sillyness of allowing the user to
> choose the actual name of the prefix and instead simply encode the
> expected defaults for various platforms into Autoconf (i.e. /usr,
> /usr/pkg, /usr/local, or whatever) and allow the user only to specify
> whether or not he/she wants to insall the package as part of the native
> system (and thus perhaps over top of native system parts), or as part of
> local add-on packages (which may duplicate some native system
> functionality).
> This seems like a useful feature, but we don't have to think of it
> as an alternative to prefix. It can be a new optional way of
> specifying prefix, sysconfdir, and whatever--under control
> of some new make variable.
> Can this be implemented in makefiles in a way that works with ordinary
> Make?
This is not a Makefile issue, it's an autoconf issue.
But we already have the solution. autoconf currently looks for
config.site at $prefix/share and $prefix/etc. Systems that want to
arrange for sysconfdir to be /etc when --prefix=/usr just have to
install /usr/(share|etc)/config.site with:
test "x$sysconfdir" != 'x${prefix}/etc' || sysconfdir=/etc
There's no need to introduce knowledge about particular systems in
autoconf: each system can take care of the issue on its own.
--
Alexandre Oliva Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me
