From maintainers-request at octave dot org Mon Nov 14 11:56:48 2005
Subject: Re: Octave 2.9.4 available for ftp
From: Quentin Spencer <qspencer at ieee dot org>
To: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
CC: octave maintainers mailing list <maintainers at octave dot org>
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 11:49:32 -0600

John W. Eaton wrote:

>On 14-Nov-2005, Quentin Spencer wrote:
>
>| The RPM build system on Fedora (I don't know if this is true of other 
>| RPM-based distributions or not) provides a makeinstall macro for use in 
>| spec files that redefines prefix at install time to install the files in 
>| a temporary location. I didn't realize that this distinction between 
>| $prefix and $DESTDIR existed; thanks for pointing that out. I have 
>| modified the spec file to use DESTDIR instead of the makeinstall macro 
>| and it appears to avoid this problem.
>
>I added DESTDIR to Octave's build files.  I don't think it is
>something you will find in all packages.
>
>The GNU Make manual seems to imply that it is OK to change prefix at
>install time.  But I'm not sure how realistic that is.  A complex
>package that looks for files at run-time is probably not going to work
>properly if you just change prefix when running make install, unless
>you do what the package systems do and move the files back to the
>expected location when installing the package.
>
>Octave will allow you to change prefix at install time, but then you
>have to set OCTAVE_HOME before running Octave, or it won't find
>startup or other script files.
>

Which startup files? The empty stub in /usr/share/octave/site/m/startup? 
The Octave packages in Fedora and RedHat have always installed into the 
temporary tree this way, but if this is the only startup file they are 
missing, I guess it's not a problem unless a user writes a customized 
system-wide startup file.

-Quentin