%makeinstall vs DESTDIR (was: Re: rpms/poker-eval/FC-4 poker-eval.spec,1.8,1.9)

[Ville Skyttä]

On Mon, 2006-06-19 at 08:59 +0100, Paul Howarth wrote:

> Actually the single best reason hasn't been included here.
[...]

Additionally, note that the DESTDIR approach is the documented way of
doing staged installs with automake and the Makefile Conventions section
of the GNU Coding Standards.  That in addition to personal experience
makes me think many upstreams are much more likely to pay attention to
having a working DESTDIR setup compared to the one %makeinstall
currently expands to, and will graciously accept patches to fix the
former in cases it doesn't work.  These docs are of course non-binding
per se wrt. the Fedora packaging guidelines, but good to know anyhow.

http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Install.html#Install
http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/DESTDIR.html#DESTDIR

Buildroot remainders may enter installed files in both approaches, but
is significantly more often encountered with %makeinstall in my
experience.  When properly installed, check-buildroot from
fedora-rpmdevtools catches those pretty well with practically no false
positives.  Hopefully we can get that (and check-rpaths) into the
production buildsys soon.