[aur-general] PKGBUILD Critique

[David Phillips]

Hi stef, contragulations on writing your first (?) PKGBUILD. There are
a few points that need clearing up before your PKGBUILD can be
released for use.


> 2) You can see I have some questions/doubts re. line 26/27 (original PKGBUILD has 26, I changed it to 27, out of habit I guess.  I don't think it's an important point though as I guess one should clean up the various dirs left after installing an AUR package, in any event, though.  Comments?)

You should almost never use `make clean`. It is up to `makepkg` and
the user to ensure the build directory is fresh. Also `|| return 1` is
not required.


Do not use `configure --foo="<anything including pkgdir>"`. It will
not do what you expect it to. `./configure` is a script which dictates
various aspects of the suite after compilation. Options such as
--prefix or --<foo>dir set values which become compiled into the
program.

Imagine that $pkgdir is `/home/user/blah/pkg`. Setting
--prefix=$pkgdir will mean that instead of /{etc,usr,var}/ the program
will have /home/user/blah/pkg/{etc,usr,var}/. So when installed using
pacman, the package is going to put a bunch of files at
/home/user/blah/pkg/, right? That's why you're getting errors
involving your home dir.

Since the program is going to eventually be installed with pacman to
`/` then you need to treat the build as if you're installing it to `/`
up until the point that you run make install. This way, all the
compiled-in values won't involve /home/blah/.

I'm probably really crap at explaining this, but it was worth a shot.

I can only suggest you read makefiles and learn what each recipe
generally does and what variables it draws on.

-- 
Four word witty remark