Re: How To Solve Problems While Relocating a Package Installation using Prefix

["Christian Goetze" <cg hq addamark com>]

> "Thou shalt use the BuildRoot." -- Installing the files directly beneath
> /usr (without using BuildRoot: so that make install goes into e.g.
> /var/tmp/package-1.0-1-root/usr/...) is considered very bad practice.
> You don't want to overwrite system files while building a package.

It's not always that simple, though. I've been repackaging perl, for
example, to include some hard-to-install modules like GD.pm and Inline.pm
and to ensure perl gets built with the right options (64bit integers among
others), and it is very hard to avoid installing it into its final resting
place prior to packaging, mainly because the test suites of the modules
expect perl to be there (and I am not going to forgo running those). It is
quite hard to convince them otherwise, and it would require applying
patches to various Makefile.PL files and other ugliness.

The way I avoid problems right now is to ensure that the final
installation location is something like

  /usr/lib/addamark/atperl/<myversion>

I know that the open source world believes in starting from the source and
doing run-time configuration at the source level, but there are people who
cannot afford to do this and who will not keep a compiler on a production
machine and are also unwilling to set up their own build and staging
environment. They expect a binary RPM to "just work".

As a side note: the fact that rpm contains no method to actually map the
build time locations to the runtime locations of files and relies on "make
install" is also sad. This is yet another place where pkgadd is superior.
--
cg