Gene LeDuc wrote
in<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-libiconv/2009-11/msg00014.html>:
Modifying the prefix variable at install time, after a different prefix has
already been hardwired into the shared libraries and executables, is not
supported. (It is also not mentioned in the INSTALL.generic file.)
We've been using stow for many years to distribute binaries to our
various servers and the way that I've found that works best is
./configure --prefix=/opt/local
make
make install prefix=/opt/local/software/packagename
The distribution package gets put into /opt/local/software/packagename
and then stow links it into /opt/local, which is first in our executable
search path. This works without any tweaking about 95% of the time.
When it needs tweaking, it just involves moving subdirectories in the
distribution tree up 2 levels.
I'll try DESTDIR, but it seems to me that I've tried it in the past and
it didn't produce stowable results.
Claudio Fontana, the author of GNU sourceinstall, recently said that:
for some packages, setting the prefix for "make install" works;
for some packages, DESTDIR works; but none of the two methods works always.
It is here that GNU sourceinstall comes in and does it right always.
(At least that's what I understood. Claudio, please correct me if I got it
wrong.)
Bruno