On 2008-06-04, Allan McRae wrote:
If I interpreted you right there, it seems a bit of a waste of time to me. When writing an Arch PKGBUILD, why would anybody write "${PREFIX}" instead of "/usr". One is a lot simpler, clearer and shorter and when writing a PKGBUILD for Arch, you are targeting Arch not every other operating system.
Also, if porting Arch PKGBUILDs to other operating systems, changing the prefix is likely to be the easy part...
I think the point is that if you are dealing with building a complete distro, or a large set of packages, then the $PREFIX variable only has to be set in one place, and then changed only in one place to rebuild the same set of packages for another arch with a different --prefix= requirement. Sure, the porting process is far more involved but then when it comes to time automate the procedure then I could imagine this global $PREFIX value could be very useful and far better than using sed to mass change any --prefix value in individual PKGBUILDs. I could also using this value to set the -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX value for KDE4s cmake invocation too. --markc