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-rw-r--r--doc/bugs/PREFIX_not_honoured_for_underlaydir.mdwn15
1 files changed, 15 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/doc/bugs/PREFIX_not_honoured_for_underlaydir.mdwn b/doc/bugs/PREFIX_not_honoured_for_underlaydir.mdwn
index fe22df19c..af2ee35cb 100644
--- a/doc/bugs/PREFIX_not_honoured_for_underlaydir.mdwn
+++ b/doc/bugs/PREFIX_not_honoured_for_underlaydir.mdwn
@@ -26,6 +26,21 @@ it shouldn't try to use /usr/share here.
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.
+
It would probably be nice if ikiwiki offered a separate build-time
setting to control where it looked for its data files, though it already
offers a way to do it at runtime (--underlaydir and --templatedir).