Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:50:14 -0500

Hi Brian,

On 2013-06-13 Brian McAllister wrote:
> The last version I worked with was 3.14.8.2.  Sometime between that release
> and 3.14.12.3, the definition of "CONFIG_INSTALLS" in
> base/configure/CONFIG_COMMON was changed to include "RELEASE*".  I say
> "sometime" as this change is NOT DOCUMENTED in the release notes.

> Before I hack the config files to do what I want, I'd like to understand
> the purpose of this change.  There was a reason, right ?

The original purpose of INSTALL_LOCATION was to allow the built software tree 
to be placed outside of the the source build tree, such as on a different 
disk or in a common production area.  Some sites use this feature, although 
many don't and we probably haven't tested it too carefully as the build 
system has changed over the years.

For the resulting installed tree to be a standard top area that can be used 
for building dependent modules against, it has to have a configure directory 
with copies of the RELEASE* files from the source tree, since they get parsed 
during the checkRelease process when building dependent modules.  I'm 
guessing that back in November 2007 when this particular change was committed 
someone had reported to Janet that you couldn't build dependent modules when 
INSTALL_LOCATION was used because the RELEASE file was missing from the 
installed tree.

You may also encounter the same problem with clashing RULES_BUILD files, if 
you have two modules that both provide their own rules for gnumake.  The 
sequencer is one such module, but there may not be any others so you could 
get lucky there.

I've talked about this with Janet and we can't think up an easy solution at 
this point, although we would like to be able to do this kind of installation 
combining in the future; if you come up with any good ideas please let us 
know.

- Andrew
-- 
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary
depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System