DESTDIR vs %makeinstall (was: Re: Request for Review: libevent)

[Ville Skyttä]

On Mon, 2005-06-20 at 23:38 +0200, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-06-17 at 16:31 +0100, José Pedro Oliveira wrote:
> 
> > make install is better as it allows to catch  configure/makefile
> > problems (%makeinstall redefines a lot of variables that %configure
> > should have initialized correctly).
> 
> this is funny. I can't count how many autofoo errors I have found with
> using %makeinstall -- I think both have their merits, "make install
> DESTDIR=..." spots missing $DESTDIR in installation rules,
> "%makeinstall" spots illegal reuse of reserved directory variable names
> and erroneous use of autoconf placeholders instead of variables (e.g.
> "@bindir@" instead of "$(bindir)").

However, "make install DESTDIR=..." is the official, documented way of
doing staged installs, so IMO the issues caught by %makeinstall are
mostly of academic interest only.
http://sources.redhat.com/automake/automake.html#index-DESTDIR-605

And some could say that overloading the standard directory variables
(which, as said, should be  correctly initialized at configure time) in
order to do a staged install in "make install", like the current
%makeinstall macro does, is abuse.  Which is possibly one reason why
DESTDIR exists in the first place...