relocatable installation

[bukzor]

Currently modules hard-codes many paths into its source and implementation before it's installed. If that installation is moved, it's broken. This is problematic for various packaging systems, especially those that make aggressive use of caching (the ones I care about are: pypi, homebrew).

Let's make the modules installation relocatable. This means we can move the installation and it continues to work. What's more, a package manager can make a tarball of an "installed" environment-modules, then use (and reuse) that tarball whenever (and whereever) environment-modules is installed.

I'll be hacking away at this task in a personal branch, but if you'd give me any pointers as to how to make this most palatable to merging upstream (to your branch), it would be most welcome.

In general, my strategy is to use the current code to embed absolute paths, but convert them to prefix-relative paths before they're used. In this way, I can ./configure --prefix=$olddir; make; make install; mv $olddir $newdir, and although $olddir/bin is still hard-coded various places, the system will work because there's an intermediate conversion that uses prefix=$olddir and bindir=$olddir/bin to generate a relative path $MYPREFIX/bin

[xdelaruelle]

Nice idea. I would suggest to have a configure option for it: --enable-relocatable (seems to be the most common name for this). When set, the paths that are replaced in the various files, when running make, are set to relative paths rather absolute.

So this change would in principle only touch makefiles and the configure script. Some new specific make rules may be needed though, as the etcdir value for instance may be different in files to translate as these files are installed in different directories.

[RobyB]

I am not an expert at all in this field, but it seems to me that if you come up with a solution taht is "relocatable" there would be no need to make it (another) user configurable option at build as if it is really relocatable it will also work without relocating it, or am i missing something trivial? Roberto

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On Mon, Feb 15, 2021 at 1:06 PM Nick Papior ***@***.***> wrote: Isn't DESTDIR support the way to go? That seems standardizable in automake ... ? — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#304 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABEJ6O2QUP53IMHDRH2BET3S7EE57ANCNFSM4JTDGV4Q> .

[xdelaruelle]

@RobyB I suggested to have a configure option as from my understanding relocatable installation goes against reproducible installation where people want to fully qualify every paths.

@zerothi DESTDIR is already supported (used for instance in RPM spec file)