Hi Eli,
Thanks for your response. I was indeed building from the tarball.
I commented out the autogen.sh call, and still the installation went into
/usr/local, instead of to the /nonstandard/location. So that was not the only
problem. After fiddling with it some more I discovered the following (sequence of errors):
- One of the arguments to my configure script was: --with-tree-sitter
- libtree-sitter-dev was not available on my system [First Mistake]
- I was running configure inside a bash shell script, and I had not put "set
-e" at the top of that bash script. [Second Mistake]
- As a result, configure correctly detected that libtree-sitter was missing and failed (and did not produce a Makefile).
- Since I hadn't "set -e", the bash script went on ahead to run make anyway,
instead of stopping right there.
- make did not find a Makefile, but found a GNUMakefile, and since there was
no Makefile, make ran configure (without arguments) to generate a Makefile,
and naturally this invocation of configure did not include my setting of
--prefix=/nonstandard/location from the previous call which failed.
- Finally when the install happened, it went into /usr/local instead of
/nonstandard/location.
- To fix, this, I have to provide tree-sitter obviously, but the quick
fix was to remove --with-tree-sitter from the arguments of configure.
- Once that was done, configure ran correctly and generated a Makefile, I
would assume including my setting of /nonstandard/location. By this time I had removed the autogen.sh call.
- Then running configure and make and make install installed correctly to
/nonstandard/location.
So technically there is nothing wrong, but I can't help wondering if it would
not be more helpful for the GNUMakefile to echo a message saying "I can't find
a Makefile, please run configure yourself to generate one", instead of being
helpful and trying to run configure for me and not quite doing it the way I
wanted. I know however that things like GNUMakefiles have a lot of history
and this behavior is probably unlikely to change.
Anyway, I'm all set now, thank you for your help!!
Best,
Ambrose