Re: Install data problems

Adriaan de Groot wrote:

> 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.

True, consistency in the use of variables requires us doing it this way.
I don't like doing something automagical here.  It would be possible to
add a specific command for this, but I doubt that would be simpler than
just using the existing mechanisms.

> 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.

That looks good.  I think that's a nice and simple solution.  I'll
include the implementation of the {installdir} attribute.  Please also
write the documentation for this!  I'll fix the comments.

-- 
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