Re: Packaging software without DESTDIR support

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%bec.de@localhost>]

On Thu, Jul 06, 2017 at 12:09:25PM -0500, J. Lewis Muir wrote:
> There's some software for which I'd like to create a pkgsrc package, but
> the software does not have DESTDIR support.  Is it still possible to
> create a pkgsrc package for software like this, and if so, how?

The short version is: no.

> More details about the software are as follows.  It seems to be a
> nontrivial effort to add DESTDIR support to it.  The software builds and
> installs to the final location, and unfortunately, it also uses programs
> (and shared libraries) it built and installed earlier in its build to
> build and install the rest of itself later in the build. :-(  This is
> particularly problematic for DESTDIR support because the programs it
> just built that it runs later in the build need to be able to find the
> shared libraries they're linked against.  (I asked the developers of
> the software if they might be open to restructuring the build so that
> it builds a bootstrap and then uses the bootstrap to build the final
> version so that it doesn't use itself while building itself, but they
> were not fans of the idea.)

Depending on the way you build, it is easy to difficult. E.g.
libtool-based builds have wrappers that provide LD_LIBRARY_PATH or will
relink the binaries as necessary during final installation. Just setting
LD_LIBRARY_PATH might also be an option.

Joerg