Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 11:41:21 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
X-Sender: eliz AT is
To: Martin Str|mberg <ams AT ludd DOT luth DOT se>
cc: DJGPP-WORKERS <djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: Re: [binkley AT sst DOT ncsl DOT nist DOT gov: djgpp and ld]
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On Thu, 22 Apr 1999, Martin Str|mberg wrote:

> > Sorry, I disagree.  Although every path name we can come up with
> > could, in theory, be used by some other package, in practice neither
> > ${DJDIR} nor "c:/djgpp" has ever been reported as a problem.  The pain
> > of going through all the Makefile's and fixing an invalid prefix is
> > too much to ask.  In contrast, today people simply need to type "make"
> > and sit back.
> > 
> > Why should we punish 99.99% of users to satisfy 0.01%?
> 
> I'm obviuosly missing something here. I thought the hard coded default
> path was never used.

It *is* used, at least in the packages I ported.  The absolute
majority of the packages use it when creating Makefiles during the
configure step.  Using --prefix='${DJDIR}' in this case means that the
produced Makefiles will find programs and directories on any DJGPP
installation out there, so this allows people who download the source
distributions to simply say "make" and see the package build itself,
instead of having to run the lengthy and much more fragile configure
step.

Other packages, like Make and ID-utils, actually expand ${DJDIR} at
run time (with special code added as part of the port) to find files
and directories.  Here, too, using ${DJDIR} yields an executable that
needs less setup (like adding environment variables to DJGPP.ENV) to
run.

> So suppose I had C:/DJGPP which is a previous version of DJGPP v1,
> D:/DJGPP which is DJGPP v2.0, D:/DJGPP.GOD which is the known latest
> stable version and E:/DJGPP which is experimental DJGPP version. What
> would happen?

Assuming you use a program that was configured with ${DJDIR}, it would
use the files from the tree referenced by the current value of the
DJGPP variable.

> (Actually, I'm not sure what should happen myself.)

;-)