Install data problems

The addition of scopes has made INSTALL_DATA a little less easy to use than it 
used to be: instead of writing INSTALL_DATA += whatever, you need to write 
_top.INSTALL_DATA, in order to ensure that a parent toplevel recipe (if any) 
gets the files. In addition, because you need to specify paths relative to 
the toplevel recipe, you always need $TOPDIR, so a typical line would read:

	_top.INSTALL_DATA += $TOPDIR/$*datafiles

instead of

	INSTALL_DATA += $datafiles

A far cry, indeed, in terms of usability. But, power has its price, so let's 
leave this.

In addition, the use of $TOPDIR makes {keepdir} as an attribute kind of 
useless: if there is a parent recipe, you probably don't want $TOPDIR 
included in the installed path. The same goes for headers: if there's a 
parent recipe, you don't want to involve $TOPDIR, but might still want to 
install a specific header in include/sys, as opposed to just include/.

What to do?

One approach would be to not use INSTALL_DATA at all, and have recipes add 
dependencies for install-dat instead, something like this:

install-data : $datafiles
	@for i in str2list(datafiles):
		@install_files(dest,i) # If "files" is taken literally, can skip the for 
loop

while that's workable, to be sure, it seems more clumsy than it needs to be. I 
like the INSTALL_DATA approach myself, mostly because it looks shorter than 
the dependency approach.

The attached patch adds a new {installdir} attribute for installing files. You 
can set it to the relative path (relative to the relevant $...DIR) where you 
want the file to be installed. For instance

	INSTALL_HEADER += $TOPDIR/time.h { installdir=sys }

will install time.h in $INCLUDEDIR/sys/time.h.

-- 
pub  1024D/FEA2A3FE 2002-06-18 Adriaan de Groot <[email protected]>
     Key fingerprint = 934E 31AA 80A7 723F 54F9  50ED 76AC EE01 FEA2 A3FE

--- RecPython.py.orig	Mon Aug 11 23:42:20 2003
+++ RecPython.py	Tue Aug 12 00:19:41 2003
@@ -772,8 +772,14 @@
             destloc = dest
 
         # with {keepdir} append the directory of the source.
-        if item.get("keepdir"):
-            destloc = os.path.join(destloc, os.path.dirname(name))
+	if item.get("installdir"):
+	    destloc = os.path.join(destloc, item.get("installdir"))
+	    if item.get("keepdir"):
+		msg_warning(recdict, _('"%s" sets both "keepdir" and "installdir"')
+		    % name )
+        else:
+	    if item.get("keepdir"):
+                destloc = os.path.join(destloc, os.path.dirname(name))
 
         destname = os.path.join(destloc, os.path.basename(name))
         scheme, mach, path = url_split3(destname)