Re: Allow configure variables to be set from environment

[Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de>]

Hi Alexis,

Alexis wrote on Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 10:58:40PM +0100:

> I have written a Hombrew

Urgs.  That symlinking business is just ridiculous, especially
when it comes to manuals.  I strongly advise against using homebrew,
it just doesn't work.  For example, mandoc(1) denies following
symlinks outside the respective manual tree for security reasons.

I admit i don't speak ruby, but your script looks wrong.
You have to run "make" as non-root and "make install" as root.
I don't see how your script is doing that.

> formula for mdocml, so OS X users can install and use mdocml.

Why is the OS X ecosystem *that* fragmented?  Now we have three OS
X ports.  One completely outdated (at Macports), one using a package
manager that is broken by design, and the best one - using pkgsrc -
maintained externally by NetBSD.

Having one official port provided officially by the operating system
developers would clearly be preferable.  Can you try to talk them
into that, maybe providing code to them that they just have to verify
and commit?  That would really be helpful!

> In order to adhere to the best practices in Homebrew I propose
> the diff below, so that certain variables like PREFIX,
> BINDIR, etc. can be changed by simply setting them in the
> environment

I intentionally do not trust the environment, it might contain
god knows what I would never dream of somebody might put there
and the user would never dream of that i might look at.
I strongly resent environment variables in general.  On the
one hand, we are all into object oriented programming, on the
other hand, people make stuff so global that it's not even
clear which applications it applies to.

When building *one* program, you certainly don't need to make
your settings completely global, or feed completely global stuff
into it.

> and without needing to edit configure, e.g.:
>   % PREFIX=/opt/local ./configure

You shouldn't edit configure, the recommended way is to
put your settings into configure.local, see INSTALL and
configure.local.example for instructions and examples.

> If there is another way to achieve this please let me know.
> 
> 9 http://brew.sh - a package manager for OS X
> 2 https://github.com/afh/homebrew/blob/pull/mdocml/Library/Formula/mdocml.rb

For now, i have linked the pull request from

  http://mdocml.bsd.lv/ports.html
  http://mdocml.bsd.lv/porthistory.html

In case it gets merged to

  https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew

please tell me to update the link.

Thanks,
  Ingo


> Index: configure
> ===================================================================
> RCS file: /cvs/mdocml/configure,v
> retrieving revision 1.17
> diff -r1.17 configure
> 66,72c66,72
> < PREFIX="/usr/local"
> < BINDIR=
> < SBINDIR=
> < INCLUDEDIR=
> < LIBDIR=
> < MANDIR=
> < EXAMPLEDIR=
> ---
> > PREFIX="${PREFIX:-/usr/local}"
> > BINDIR=${BINDIR}
> > SBINDIR=${SBINDIR}
> > INCLUDEDIR=${INCLUDEDIR}
> > LIBDIR=${LIBDIR}
> > MANDIR=${MANDIR}
> > EXAMPLEDIR=${EXAMPLEDIR}
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