Re: GNU standards: DESTDIR with symlinks

[Paul Smith]

On Mon, 2022-09-26 at 17:07 -0400, Adrian Mariano wrote:
> > Speaking as someone who does a lot of relocating of things, IMO the
> > correct solution is that the symlink resolves to a relative path,
> > not a fully-qualified path, so that it works correctly regardless
> > of whether the installation is used in-place or after relocation.
> 
> Surely when this is an option it would be the way to go.  But in my
> case, a relative path between the files is not known because the link
> is between datadir and sharedstatedir.

The only way it can be the case that you can have a fully-qualified
path but not a relative path is if you are allowing the "origin" to be
relocatable, but not the "target".

Else, it's quite feasible to turn any fully-qualified path into a
relative path although it may require some shell (or makefile, if you
require GNU make) trickery.