ports/158179: some packages do not fully honor -P dir option in pkg_add(1)

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

The following reply was made to PR ports/158179; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Stephen Montgomery-Smith <stephen at missouri.edu>
To: Stefan Bethke <stb at lassitu.de>
Cc: "bug-followup at freebsd.org" <bug-followup at freebsd.org>,
        "freebsd at sopwith.solgatos.com" <freebsd at sopwith.solgatos.com>,
        "current at freebsd.org" <current at freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: ports/158179: some packages do not fully honor -P dir option
 in pkg_add(1)
Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2011 10:37:53 -0500

 On 07/16/2011 04:26 AM, Stefan Bethke wrote:
 > Am 16.07.2011 um 04:43 schrieb Stephen Montgomery-Smith:
 >
 >> I was looking through the source code of pkg_add.  Personally I don't see how the "-P" or "-p" option could be made to work with pkg_add. Many of the installation commands involve scripts which have ${PREFIX} hard coded into them.  ${PREFIX} is often hard coded when trhe package is created by the port.  In my opinion, the options "-p" and "-P" should be removed from pkg_add.
 >>
 >> Either that, or provide the port a way to access "@cwd" in any scripts it installs.  But this would require a major overhaul of the whole ports system, and probably much of the software it installs as well.
 >>
 >> Am I missing something?
 >
 > Yes.  Not honoring the prefix is a bug in the port.  If you do need to do prefix-specific things during install, use pkg-install, see http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/porters-handbook/pkg-install.html
 >
 > I suspect that many ports are not well tested outside of "/usr/local", but the infrastructure is there and available.
 
 You are correct, this needs to be done on a port by port basis.  In some 
 ports this is going to be a big job, because in some cases the 
 "/usr/local" is hard coded into certain binaries.
 
 For example, suppose the C source code contains something like:
 char applications_dir = "/usr/local/share/applications";
 and this is filled in by the ./configure script.
 
 How is that handled?