Subject: bug#16772: Failure in "make install" on MS-Windows

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2014 22:36:04 +0200

> From: Glenn Morris <[email-masked]>
> Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2014 14:06:53 -0500
> Cc: [email-masked], Juanma Barranquero <[email-masked]>
> 
> Dani Moncayo wrote:
> 
> >      If you want the installation tree to go to a place that is
> >      different from the one specified by --prefix, say
> >
> >        make install prefix=/where/ever/you/want
> 
> Seems weird to me for Emacs to be recommending that.
> Why would one not specify the right prefix at configure time...?

The above doesn't change the configure-time prefix, as far as
directories recorded in the binaries are concerned.  It just installs
under a different tree root.

It is convenient to do that when you are preparing a binary
distribution, because you then create a tree that includes a single
package.

The reason nt/INSTALL recommends this technique, as opposed to
DESTDIR, is because that is what I use.  And the reason I prefer not
to use DESTDIR is that it fails on Windows if --prefix specified a
Windows style absolute file name, as in --prefix=d:/usr, because you
cannot prepend any non-empty string to that without producing an
invalid file name.