Re: Help with installing Emacs 23(CVS) to a custom path

[Tim X <timx@nospam.dev.null>]

Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I was trying to install Emacs 23 from CVS on a Scientific Linux 4 machine and
> ran into some problems. I am limited with write permissions to only my home
> area and the /scratchdisk. So I checked out the CVS tree in a directory in
> /scratchdisk and built emacs using
>
> $ ./configure
> $ make bootstrap
>
> Then I edited the Makefile to use ${prefix}=/scratchdisk/myfolder and ran
>
> $ make install
>
> But this fails as make tries to install _some_ files in /usr/local/share/
>
> How do I ask make to install everything in /scratchdisk/myfolder ? Also can I
> remove my build directory after `make install' succeeds? (short on disk space)
>
> Thanks for any pointers.

There are a couple of things

1. Don't install. run form the directory you built emacs in. I do this a
lot and it works fine. 

2. the configure program has the option --with-prefix, which you can use
to control the leading prefix for all the other bits. For exmaple,
--with-prefix=/usr/local. This will still want to put things in
/usr/local/libexec, l/usr/local/bin, /usr/local/share/emacs,
/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp etc. So, create these dirs off the root
of where you want it to be isntalled. i.e. /home/fred/emacs/libexec,
/home/fred/emacs/share, etc. 

3. If you run ./configure --help, it will list all the options to
configure. Included in these optons are all the path setings i.e.
bindir, libdir etc. Use all these to set the paths where you want them
with configure i.e.

./configure --with-libdir=/home/fred/emacs/lib
--with-bindir=/home/fred/bin --with-infodir=/home/fred/info etc. 

Personally, I would just run from the build dir. 

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au