Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] tools: don't expand prefix and exec_prefix too early

["Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx>]

>>> On 08.08.12 at 16:45, Matt Wilson <msw@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 08, 2012 at 07:39:13AM -0700, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> >>> On 08.08.12 at 16:26, "Jan Beulich" <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> > A comment in tools/configure says that it is intended for these to be
>> > command line overridable, so they shouldn't get expanded at configure
>> > time.
>> 
>> In addition, it would have been _very_ nice if it had been
>> prominently announced that with (I believe) 25594:ad08cd8e7097
>>
>> it is now _required_ to configure with --libdir on x86-64, or else all
>> the .so-s end up under /usr/lib. Figuring this out and getting the
>> patch here in the right form to be able to use the most compatible
>> form --libdir='${exec_prefix}'/lib64 has taken me a good part of
>> the day, which could have been avoided if this whole configure
>> adjustment (much like had apparently been missing already in
>> earlier cases) had been done properly. I just can't imagine I'm
>> the only one having used no options at all, and things working
>> nevertheless despite .../lib not being in the library search paths
>> used when running xl et al.
> 
> I'm sorry for the trouble it cause you today, Jan. I thought I called
> it out sufficiently in the commit log:
> 
>     With this change, packagers can supply the desired location for
>     shared libraries on the ./configure command line. Packagers need
>     to note that the default behaviour on 64-bit Linux systems will be
>     to install shared libraries in /usr/lib, not /usr/lib64, unless a
>     --libdir value is provided to ./configure.

No, this comment says "can", not "have to". Plus you don't really
expect people to read every changeset's description, do you?

> The new behavior is consistent with all packages that use autoconf.

That indeed appears to be the case, admittedly to my not
insignificant surprise.

> Would a separate email on the topic to xen-devel, apart from the patch
> discussion, have helped raise awareness?

Yes. I for my part follow only very selected tools side discussions,
and expect the tools maintainers to get things sorted out. But of
course I need to build and run the tools, so if some change gets
done to the way things need to get built (or run) successfully
then announcing this independently of the patch would certainly
be helpful in general.

Jan


_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xen.org/xen-devel