[GRASS5] Proposal for make

Eric Mitchell emitchell at altaira.com
Tue Dec 19 11:40:57 EST 2000


Most of the open/free software projects work in such a manner.
i.e. "make" generates all the libraries, executables, etc. and
"make install" copies them to their final destinations.

As far as grass goes, you may have to add to the list of library 
directories for the linking of executables, as you can't just 
reference -L$GISBASE/lib and pick up all the libraries.


Markus Neteler wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Dec 19, 2000 at 03:23:42PM +0700, Justin Hickey wrote:
> > Hello all
> >
> > In view of the "disaster" that happened to one of our users today I
> > would like to propose the following changes for the Makefile.
> >
> > I think it is vital that grass should NOT be compiled as the root user.
> > The standard way to compile open source software is usually
> >
> > configure
> > make
> > make install
> >
> > where only the "make install" step is run as the root user. Our problem
> > is that we do not have the Makefile system required for this type of
> > installation. Thus, I propose the following as a means for removing the
> > need to be root user to compile grass.
> >
> > We can change the Makefile to have a new target (say binaries) that
> > would perform basically the same task as what "make install" does now
> > but it would not require root access and would not install anything
> > under /usr/local. Instead, GISBASE would be defined as the current
> > directory and all compilation would occur below this directory. Grass
> > can currently do this now since this is how I compile grass. Now the
> > only problem is that we need to copy the files to the installation
> > directories. So, we redefine "make install" to do this and the only
> > problem would be to change the value of GISBASE in the grass5 script
> > after it is copied. This should be a simple task to do. Now a user can
> > compile grass with
> >
> > configure
> > make binaries
> > make install
> >
> > and the only step that may require root access will be the "make
> > install". In fact we could even check that the uid is not root for make
> > binaries and suggest that the user not compile as user root.
> >
> > Of course we would also need to provide a "make uninstall" that deleted
> > the files copied by "make install".
> >
> > If people agree to this proposal then I further propose that this system
> > be incorporated for grass5.0 stable.
> >
> > As always, any comments and/or criticisms are more than welcome.
> Hi Justin,
> 
> your proposal sounds reasonable. It seems to be a good workaround unless
> the new Makefile system comes for 5.1.
> A "simple" copy as root to put the binaries in place shouldn't be
> dangerous.
> Why didn't we think of this earlier?
> 
> >From my side: Please go ahead. Thanks you for looking into this problem.
> 
> Yours
> 
>  Markus
> 
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