Allow user install

[Simon J. Gerraty]

On Tue, 26 Jun 2012 12:54:24 +0200, =?utf-8?Q?Dag-Erling_Sm=C3=B8rgrav?= writes
:
>I've been thinking for a while that some bor^H^H^Henterprising soul
>should hack install(1) so that if a specific environment variable is
>set, it writes the file to a tarball instead of writing it to disk.

That's an interesting twist.
But rather than do violence to the meaning of "install" it might be
better to skip it completely.

The Junos build has for many years produced install images without 
"installing" anything.   We are working on a variant of that approach
for freebsd, which should prove useful. 

This patch is unrelated to that btw, but provides a intermediate improvement
which I thought might be useful in an of itself.

Teaching makefiles to tell tools what you actually want is better than
hacking tools to ignore what you told them to do ;-)

>Unfortunately, there would still be a ton of ${LN} etc. that would need

Not sure I follow, ln isn't an issue when "installing" into a location
that you own - eg the $DESTDIR model, and if you are not doing that
supressing -o etc args won't help.

>(BTW, I find INSTALL_OWN confusing - how about UNPRIVILEGED_INSTALL or
>USER_INSTALL?)

I always say, naming stuff is hard ;-)
Which is half the reason for posting the patch - to get feedback on the
name.

Thanks
--sjg