Date: Thu, 04 Jul 2002 10:18:11 -0700
From: Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com>
--On Thursday, July 04, 2002 12:36:38 PM -0400 DJ Delorie
<dj@redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> I think that's fine. And if we can really simplify our makefiles
>> that's worth more than being able to change the $srcdir around. We
>> can always add that later if someone really, really needs it.
>
> What about the case where you do a build on one machine, and do "make
> install" on many others with different mount points? Doesn't that
> need to know where srcdir is, yet srcdir is a different location for
> them?
Yes -- but this is exactly the kind of thing that I think we can live
without.
I know people do this; I know it's convenient.
...
It may be that it's easier to replace this usage with another
convenient way to do things. For instance, GCC is supposed to be
location-independent; perhaps we could ask that people who would use
'make install' to install on multiple machines in different places
instead use the (well-tested and often-used) facilities to install in
an alternative directory, and then use 'tar' or a package management
tool to move the binaries to where they need to go.