Re: [gentoo-dev] prefix overide portage

["Arcady Genkin" <agenkin@thpoon.com>]

Dave Lee <davel@canuck.com> writes:

>> > I noticed that alot of packages in portage statically set the
>> > install prefix.
>> 
>> Yes alot of packages are setup that way.  I'm of a mixed opinion if
>> thats a good or a bad thing.  If we do decide to make it more
>> configurable down the road its going to require alot of ebuild touchups,
>> etc.  Alot of configure scripts require path information to headers,
>> assume files are in various locations, etc.  I can tell from experience
>> if you set a less-then-common prefix many configure scripts are going to
>> break on you (meaning we'd have to hack on a bunch of them :(
>
> I don't think this would actually be "hacking", I would call it something
> much nicer, like cleaning up.  

I could not agree more.  I think that it would be extremely useful to
be able to set a custom prefix for packages installation.  There is a
large upgrade coming up in our lab, and I'm going to try to make a
case for Gentoo to replace Redhat.  But I know that one of the
problems that my boss is going to point out is inability to easilly
package software into /local (our conventional location) instead of
/usr.

> It should't be too much effort to let loose some scripts on the
> portage tree to fix --preifx=/usr to --preifx=$SOME_PREFIX_VAR where
> the SOME_PREFIX_VAR can be set in /etc/make.conf.

There's more to it than that, but, arguably, nothing that cannot be
done.

I, too, suggest that we introduce the functionality of the custom
package prefix in /etc/make.conf.
-- 
Arcady Genkin
Don't read everyting you believe.