On Sun, Jan 23, 2005 at 02:11:28PM +0200, Krasimir Angelov wrote:
There are two options for prefixes: --prefix and --copy-prefix. In my opinion they have the same meaning and I wonder whether we need to have two different options for configure and copy commands. Any thoughts?
The typical procedure for building a Linux binary distribution is to build an image of part of the directory tree on the target system in a subdirectory of the build system. So the place you install to on the build machine (copy-prefix) may differ from the place the files will end up (prefix). For example, you might want to install /usr/share/foo/datafile /usr/bin/foo with the latter having the former name compiled in. Of course you don't want to clobber those on the build machine. So the builder might create files /tmp/build.1234/usr/share/foo/datafile /tmp/build.1234/usr/bin/foo (referring to /usr/share/foo/datafile) so they can move into /tmp/build.1234 to create a tar file that an installer can unpack in the root directory of the target machine. Here we'd have --prefix=/usr --copy-prefix=/tmp/build.1234/usr.