Re: What is up with BuildRoot ?

[Tim Mooney <mooney dogbert cc ndsu NoDak edu>]

In regard to: What is up with BuildRoot ?, Dinh Tien Tuan Anh said (at...:

> Alright, so i am pretty confused about BuildRoot. Clearly, it said in
> many document that it is were temporarily built files will be.

You already understand it better than many people new to RPM packaging.

> 1. While building the package, in the %install section, we did specify
> that the software should be installed in the temporary root (BuildRoot).

If it helps, don't think of it as %install, think of it as
%put_my_files_somewhere_temporary_for_rpm_to_bundle

> Ok, that works fine. But if i bring the binary RPM package to install
> somewhere else, the software is still installed in /usr/bin or other
> root-access directory.  So with the binary RPM, does it ALWAYS get
> installed in the system directory, no matter how it was built ????

It always gets installed based on the paths you specify in the %files
section.  If you specify /usr/bin/foo, that's where the "foo" file or
directory will be installed when you use "rpm -ivh" or whatever to
actually install that packages on the target system(s).

If your %files section uses /usr/local/bin/foo or /opt/MySoft/bin/foo,
then that's where "foo" would get installed.

> 2. What is up with the %makeinstall macros anyway ? Does it just prepends
> the "prefix" and other things ?

More or less, yeah.

> What if the source's Makefile (of the .tar.gz file) does not define the
> "prefix" variable ?

Then %makeinstall won't really work correctly.  It's just a convenience
that works with most packages, especially packages that have a Makefile
generated by a GNU autoconf-based configure script.  It doesn't work with
everything.

Tim
--
Tim Mooney                              mooney dogbert cc ndsu NoDak edu
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