fix picked

[ikiwiki] / doc / bugs / PREFIX_not_honoured_for_underlaydir.mdwn

I built ikiwiki using

% perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/home/ed
% make
% make install

This installs the files under /home/ed, for example one of the lines it prints is

cp -a basewiki/* /home/ed/share/ikiwiki/basewiki

However when I try to run ikiwiki I get an error as follows:

% ikiwiki --verbose ~/wikiwc/ ~/public_html/wiki/ --url=http://membled.com/wiki/ 
Can't stat /usr/share/ikiwiki/basewiki: No such file or directory 
 at /home/ed/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/IkiWiki/Render.pm line 349 

The PREFIX specified at build time should also affect the share directory -
it shouldn't try to use /usr/share here.

> Actually, the PREFIX, no matter where you specify it, is only
> intended to control where files are _installed_, not where they're
> looked for at runtime.

> There's a good reason not to make PREFIX be used to actually
> change the program's behavior: Most packaging systems use PREFIX
> when building the package, to make it install into a temporary
> directory which gets packaged up.

This is not the case.  That is the difference between PREFIX and DESTDIR.

DESTDIR does what you describe; it causes the files to be installed into some
directory you specify, which may not be the same place you'd eventually
run it from.

PREFIX means build the software to run under the location given.  Normally it
will also affect the location files are copied to, so that 'make install'
installs a working system.

At least, that's the way I've always understood it; the MakeMaker documentation
isn't entirely clear (perhaps because ordinary Perl modules do not need to be
configured at build time depending on the installation directory).  It does mention
that DESTDIR is the thing used by packaging tools.

> Thanks for clarifying that. [[bugs/done]] --[[Joey]]