Re: GNU configure magic prepending instead of replacing --mandir?

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Hauke Fath <hf%spg.tu-darmstadt.de@localhost> writes:

> looking at an editors/xemacs-current build error on Solarish, I had
> reason to explicitly GNU configure with --mandir=, both because the
> package is special in not specifying the subdir in the install target,
> and because FWER the Solarish build* ended up with PREFIX/share/man.
>
> Unfortunately, that didn't work, and it looks like the options added
> to CONFIGURE_ARGS _prepend_, not replace, a long string of default
> options. In particular, the long string has --mandir
> ${GNU_CONFIGURE_PREFIX}/${PKGMANDIR} as set in
> mk/configure/gnu-configure.mk, which apparently takes precedence over
> whatever the package Makefile wants to set.
>
> Is this precedence, which would make setting (at least some) configure
> options from a package Makefile pointless, known and/or documented?
>
> In the end, I set GNU_CONFIGURE_MANDIR to what I need it to be.

My best guess is that the plan is that arguments automatically specified
would not also be specified manually.   pkgsrc sets mandir to not rely
on the (likely wrong for pkgsrc) default.

Setting GNU_CONFIGURE_MANDIR does seem like the right way.  With that,
there's no reason to want to add another --mandir.  

Passing $prefix/man seems very straightforward.  I don't understand the
problem you had.  It sounds like the package might be buggy, in which
case the usual approach is to patch it, or at least report this
upstream.