Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Tue, 9 Feb 2010 13:53:52 -0600

On Monday 08 February 2010 17:02:27 Benjamin Franksen wrote:
> On Montag, 8. Februar 2010, J. Lewis Muir wrote:
> > In particular, I would like it if:
> >
> > 1. there was a way to build EPICS without installing it; and if there
> >    already is, make it the default.  Right now, running "gnumake"
> >    builds and installs.  To me it should just build.  I should run
> >    "gnumake install" if I want to install it.
>
> +1

I agree, but unfortunately it's not easy to do this.  The problem is that Base 
builds many programs which later runs when building other parts of itself, 
such as dbToRecordtypeH.  Installing those programs immediately makes them 
easier to run, as it allows us to use the same make rules for both internal 
and external builds.  As well as the executable paths, we use shared libraries 
for most architectures by default; if those library files were not in their 
installed location when needed by an executable, we would have to set 
LD_LIBRARY_PATH when building Base but *not* when building external 
applications after Base has been installed.

I have been working to try and rewrite some programs as Perl scripts which 
don't need installing, but I can't fine any replacements for flex (lex) and 
antelope (yacc) written in Perl that will generate C code.  The output from 
those programs is compiled and run on the target so the C output is essential, 
and rewriting them myself seems a rather daunting and wasteful task.

We could split Base into several pieces which you would then have to build and 
install in order, but I don't really think this would be a better solution in 
practice.

You can currently do this:
  make
  make INSTALL_LOCATION=/path/to/install

The second make results in some recompilation, but it doesn't re-do everything 
AFAICT.  Of course you must ensure that you haven't set the INSTALL_LOCATION 
variable in your CONFIG_SITE file, and this doesn't help if your aim is to run 
the install step on a different machine with no compilers, but the result is 
that all the necessary files get installed.

- Andrew
-- 
The best FOSS code is written to be read by other humans -- Harald Welte

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System