Re: Installation proposal

[Per Bothner <per at bothner dot com>]

Mark Mitchell wrote:
> What's good about this?

5. The Makefiles for builting libraries can be simpler:  Just use
"install/bin/g++", not "g++ -B... -nostdinc++ -I..."
(This is a variant of your point 1.)

6. Easier to "run in place" without installing.  I.e. don't need
to 'make install' - just add the $builddir/install to the $PATH.
(Emacs already allows this.)

7. Possibly cleaner 'make bootstrap' - use a different install
directory for each stage.

> We can just have the top-level configure set the prefix for all of the
> child configures to "install".  Then, have the top-level "make" and
> "make bootstrap" do what they do now, plus "make install" in all of
> the children.  Then, have the top-level "make install" do the copying
> step.  Sounds like one day's work to get it working, and another one
> to debug the fallout.

One disadvantage is that this would require more disk space while
building, since you need teh addition space for the install directory.
But this problem can be incrementally reduced as you gradually fix
sub-directories to leave files directly in the install directory.

I suggest chaninging the name from 'install' to 'build'.  It isn't
the real install directory.  Ideally, for sub-directories that have
been converted to this convention, you still have 'make install',
but it just copies from the 'build' directory to $prefix.  This is
not critical, but it might be useful if one wanted to install files
in a sub-directory only.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://www.bothner.com/per/