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>>>>> On Sat, 30 Aug 2014, Michał Górny wrote: |
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> I believe that we should work towards deprecating and removing |
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> the einstall helper from PMS, for the following reasons: |
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> [...] |
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> Why do we have einstall? |
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> ------------------------ |
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> I don't know the exact reasoning for having it in the first place. |
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> One reason I've heard is that old versions of automake didn't support |
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> DESTDIR, and therefore we had to specify all the directories. However, |
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> DESTDIR support in automake dates back to 1998 when automake 1.3 was |
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> released -- and that pretty much predates Gentoo. |
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> I've asked Ciaran about it, and he said that 'the idea was to avoid |
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> people duplicating anything'. In other words, that einstall was used |
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> only because calling 'emake install DESTDIR="${D}"' was considered bad. |
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> If anyone could shed some more light into this, I'd appreciate that. |
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Looks like econf and einstall were added to Portage at the same time, |
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in January 2002: |
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http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-src/portage/bin/ebuild.sh?hideattic=0&revision=1.12&view=markup |
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The earliest mentioning of einstall that I could find in our mailing |
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lists is in the following post (interestingly, its subject also starts |
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with "The future of"): |
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http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_52c0fb35cfe1bb3228f9ec1816bb2aeb.xml |
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However, "make DESTDIR=${D} install" already existed in |
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base_src_install in 2001, before einstall was introduced: |
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http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/eclass/base.eclass?revision=1.1&view=markup#l59 |
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> What should we do? |
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> ------------------ |
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> As I see it, we should simply ban einstall in EAPI 6. This way, we |
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> can prevent further mistakes from happening and let developers fix |
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> the current consumers once bumping EAPI (or lastrite them at some |
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> point). |
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It may be worth mentioning that econf in EAPI 6 will pass --docdir |
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and --htmldir options to configure. These would take precedence over |
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einstall's prefix="${ED}"/usr, i.e. einstall's path for documentation |
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files would be broken because ${D} would be missing from it. |
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So _if_ we decide to keep einstall, then we would have to pass |
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additional docdir and htmldir variables. OTOH, maybe this would be a |
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good occasion for getting rid of the function. |
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Ulrich |
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