[pacman-dev] Configure --prefix in PKGBUILD scripts

[Mark Constable]

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