[darcs-users] Config patch

Sean E. Russell darcs at ser.fdns.net
Mon Jun 30 13:27:41 UTC 2003


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Heya,

I'm submitting a patch for the darcs 'configure' file in 0.9.10.  I know 
there's been some discussion of using autoconf in the list, but this patch 
may help some people in the short term.

Please note that I'm not actually *using* darcs yet, so I'm submitting the 
patch as an attachment to this mailing list.

This patch does three things:

1) it removes the dependency on perl,
2) it allows the configuration mechanism a better chance of finding the GHC 
includes, and
3) it cleans out a small amount of duplicate code in the shell script

In particular, on Gentoo, darcs can be installed in /opt.  In fact, anybody 
who doesn't have root access to a machine and would like to have access to 
darcs may need to install GHC themselves, and the installation target will 
most likely be $HOME.  The darcs configuration file will fail to locate Rts.h 
in this case.

This patch changes the configure script so that:

	1) if GHCINC is defined, this is used as the includes dir,
	2) else, if /usr/lib/ghc.../include or /usr/local/lib/ghc.../include exists, 
these will be used,
	3) otherwise, it uses ghc-pkg to locate where it thinks ghc is installed, and 
checks for the existence of an include dir there.  If it finds the directory, 
it is used.  If it doesn't it prints an error message with some help text, 
and exit .

Feel free to discard this patch.

Oh, two other things.

Firstly, what would the reception be if I modified the build to bypass 
generation of the documentation if LaTeX is not installed?  None of the 
machines I've worked on in the last five years have had LaTeX (or TeX) 
installed, and am unwilling to install a package of that magnitude for the 
sole purpose of generating documentation for darcs.  Please note that I'm not 
dissing LaTeX; I was a heavy user of LaTeX in college, ages and ages ago, and 
am a firm believer in "whatever floats your boat".  My sole concern is to not 
require LaTeX on systems where it isn't used.

Secondly, I'd like to write a Gentoo ebuild for darcs.  All ebuilds for 
Portage (the Gentoo package management system) have a requirement that the 
users be able to specify where the install process places files.  This isn't 
just an issue of specifying '--prefix'; the Portage build process actually 
installs the files into a temporary directory, and then copies the files to 
their final location.  This protects the system from install failures by 
providing improved atomicity, and also allows Portage to track which files 
are being installed.  So, normally, the process would go something like:

	configure --prefix=/opt/darcs/0.9.10
	make
	make install -d /var/tmp/portage/build/darcs/0.9.10

and then portage would move the files from /var/tmp/portage/build/darcs/0.9.10 
to /opt/darcs/0.9.10 (or /usr/local, or wherever).

So: if I provide a patch that allows the install process to install the darcs 
files into an arbitrary directory that *isn't* the --prefix directory, would 
it be favorably received?  I can certainly maintain a separate patch for 
Gentoo that is applied when the package is emerged, but it would be a tiny 
bit more work for me (long term) and I'm lazy :-)

Thanks, and sorry if any (or all) of this email is noise.

- -- 
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