Re: auto{conf,make} & DJGPP: DESTDIR

[Tim Van Holder]

On Fri, 2003-01-10 at 14:27, Richard Dawe wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> I've ported autoconf 2.57 and automake 1.7.2 to DJGPP, based on Tim van
> Holder's work.
> 
> Unfortunately DESTDIR support is currently broken for DJGPP.
> The reason is that the generated Makefiles do things like
> $(DESTDIR)$(binprefix). $(binprefix) could be something like c:/djgpp/bin and
> $(DESTDIR) could be, say, d:/put/packages/here/. So $(DESTDIR)$(binprefix)
> becomes d:/put/packages/here/c:/djgpp/bin, which doesn't make sense.
> 
> DJGPP supports referring to c: as /dev/c. So one possible solution to this
> problem is to ensure that $(prefix) and its derivatives are always mapped to
> /dev/<letter>/ paths from <letter>: paths. But where would this mapping take
> place? In autoconf alone? Or would both autoconf and automake require
> modification?
> 
> Please CC me on any replies, because I'm not subscribed to autoconf or
> bug-automake.
> 
> Thanks, regards,

I don't think this is autoconf/automake's job really.  There's plenty of
places where using dos style paths can break things (usually because the
':' in the drivespec gets seen as a list separator), and fixes for that
are usually disruptive (those that aren't tend to have been integrated
by now).  As such, any fixes for this would tend to be the domain of
the specific ports.
On DJGPP, prefixes should generally use /dev/env/DJDIR -style paths
(and our autoconf port defaults to /dev/env/DJDIR instead of /usr/local
for this reason as well).
AFAIK, there is only one platform really affected, and that's OS/2; the
two other main DOSish platforms (cygwin and djgpp) both have systems
to deal with path in a more POSIX way (/cygdrive/c/... and /dev/c/...
respectively).  Admittedly, it would be nice if (ports of) autoconf
complained if they saw a DOS-style path in a prefix var (and suggest
an alternative), but often those vars are user-defined, and
autoconf/configure can't automagically know when to complain or not.

-- 
Tim Van Holder <address@hidden>