Re: [be] Packages (and a Makefile.am bug? )

[Jonathan Marsden]

Teus,

On 10/15/2010 10:42 PM, Teus Benschop wrote:

> On Fri, 2010-10-15 at 11:03 -0700, Jonathan Marsden wrote:

>> I'll take a look. Packaging bibledit-gtk should be relatively 
>> straightforward. ...

> Thank you, Jonathan.

I tried...

I think I have uncovered a subtle bug in two Makefile.am files that were
changed between 4.0 and 4.1.  These are doc/Makefile.am and
usfm/Makefile.am .  The issue is (as far as I can tell) that they now
have rules which install files without using DESTDIR.  The GNU Automake
manual says at

  http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/manual/automake/Staged-Installs.html

that:

  Support for DESTDIR is implemented by coding it directly into the
  install rules. If your Makefile.am uses a local install rule (e.g.,
  install-exec-local) or an install hook, then you must write that code
  to respect DESTDIR.

In bibledit-gtk's case it is not an install-exec-local but an
install-data-local -- the principle is the same.

The effect is that during the package build process, instead of
installing to a temporary install location from which it can create
packages, tries to install directly to /usr/share/bibledit-gtk and fails.

You can test this in normal command-line compilation and installation by
doing

  ./configure --prefix=/foo
  make
  make DESTDIR=/tmp/justesting install

and note that the install will (incorrectly) try to put the files from
doc/ and usfm into /foo , but will (correctly) put everything else into
/tmp/justtesting/foo .

I can almost certainly patch around this, but it would definitely be
good if you could check on these Makefile.am files, and update them if
you agree that it is appropriate to do so.

Assuming I have understood this issue correctly (!), you would just need
to add $(DESTDIR) before each occurrence of $(prefix) in the two files
(and then regenerate your Makefile.in files etc. using autoreconf).

Could you please take a look at this, and let me know if you agree with
my assessment?

Thanks,

Jonathan