Staging DOs & DON'Ts

[Peter Pentchev]

On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 10:30:03AM +0200, Kimmo Paasiala wrote:
> Could we have this as an example what not to in the Makefile. It is
> from the latest change to the Makefile of sysutils/kiconvtool.
> 
> 
> MAKE_ARGS=     PREFIX="${STAGEDIR}${PREFIX}"
> 
> This breaks stuff that edits scripts in place trying to replace paths
> that depend on the value of PREFIX.

The proper way to do this - and the way it's done on other OSs and other
packaging systems that have the staging directory feature - is to:

1. Pass ${STAGEDIR} as a separate build option to the actual build;
   it's traditional to pass it as the DESTDIR option:

   MAKE_ARGS+=	DESTDIR="${STAGEDIR}"

2. Make sure that the actual build honors DESTDIR.  Yes, this does mean
   that in some cases you have to patch the upstream build system; please
   do this, and please forward the patches to the upstream authors, so
   that their piece of software builds properly everywhere and is that
   much easier to package for everyone :)

Yes, this does involve a bit more work for the port maintainer in cases
when the upstream build system is not yet DESTDIR-aware.  Yes, this is
actually a good thing, this is practically an omission of the upstream
authors that will be corrected sooner or later by somebody, either
the FreeBSD port maintainer or some other packager :)

G'luck,
Peter

-- 
Peter Pentchev	roam at ringlet.net roam at FreeBSD.org p.penchev at storpool.com
PGP key:	http://people.FreeBSD.org/~roam/roam.key.asc
Key fingerprint 2EE7 A7A5 17FC 124C F115  C354 651E EFB0 2527 DF13
If you think this sentence is confusing, then change one pig.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/attachments/20131031/dac0de00/attachment.sig>