[Rd] R-Project build system: DESTDIR support

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

Hi Claudio,

On 25 February 2006 at 03:11, Claudio Fontana wrote:
| Hello,
| 
| I am writing you about the GNU R-Project,
| as part of by effort to help GNU projects provide a better, more
| consistent build system.
| 
| Currently, your project does not support the DESTDIR variable in
| generated Makefiles (marked as optional in the GNU coding policies, make and
| automake manual).
| 
| In my opinion, DESTDIR support can be very helpful for the user, the
| distribution-specific packagers and third-party programs, because it
| offers a consistent and portable way to perform staged installations.

I'm confused. We've been maintaining R in Debian quite merrily even with the
exisiting standards. To the best of my knowledge things seem to work without
DESTDIR. 

In a nutshell, what we do -- and this is, or at least used to be, pretty
canonical across GNU-style packages and has been in effect for probably a
dozen years.  Now, I may miss something newer happening elsewhere...

The key is that configure details the _final_ location on the installed
system, whereas 'make install' pivots off to a subdirectory in the archive of
the currently built package is 'installed' before being tarred:

	./configure --prefix=/usr			\
		    --with-system-bzlib			\
[...]
		    --build $(buildarch)

[...]

	$(MAKE)		CFLAGS="$(compilerflags)"		\
			CXXFLAGS="$(compilerflags)"		\
			FFLAGS="$(compilerflags)"		\
			CC=${compiler}				\
			CXX=${cxxcompiler}			\
			${fortrancompiler}			\
			R

[...]

	$(MAKE) prefix=$(debtmp)/usr				\
		mandir=$(debtmp)/usr/share/man			\
		rsharedir=$(debtmp)/usr/share/R/share		\
		rincludedir=$(debtmp)/usr/share/R/include	\
		rdocdir=$(debtmp)/usr/share/R/doc		\
		install

So could you detail how using DESTDIR makes this (or, for that matter,
another) use case any easier or better?
 
| In each case, please contact me at this address <claudio at gnu.org>
| to provide your feedback about this issue _in any case_, should you
| want to support DESTDIR or not.
|
| I am ready to offer you information, help and support.

You may want to talk to Kurt Hornik who covers the autoconf et al build
process for R.  Whenever I had little gripes or needs, he reflected these
and typically with much better solutions than I could have proposed :)
 
| Thank you for your help in making GNU projects build systems better.

Thanks for this initiative. It could indeed makes things better

Cheers, Dirk


-- 
Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something. 
                                                  -- Thomas A. Edison