Porting to OS/2: First port #4 installation

Installation is done by make install. At previous article, I said that FLAC was installed into /usr/local. However, there can be people which want to install elsewhere.

To do this, we should look into options of configure. Out of options, we should note --prefix option. With this option, we can change the installation directory. The default value is /usr/local. So FLAC was installed in /usr/local when configuring without any options.

If you want to install /usr instead of /usr/local, then call configure with --prefix=/usr option. --prefix should be absolute path, that is, it should start with '/'.

Then, let's install to /usr.

1. configure --prefix=/usr
2. make install

Maybe is it not possible to change installation directory after configure ? Yes, it is. We can use DESTDIR varaible when calling make.

• make install DESTDIR=/flac

Like --prefix, DESTDIR should start with '/'. With DESTDIR, FLAC will be installed in /flac/usr. However, it is not recommended to use this installation directly. Because some informations such as locations of libraries and shares, are already fixed in according to --prefix.  As a result, packages in DESTDIR may not work correctly.

So it would be better to use DESTDIR for installation test or packaging.