Re: [PATCH 1/1] Honor $(prefix) set in config.mak* when defining ETC_GIT* and sysconfdir

Johannes Sixt [off-list ref] writes:

Junio's worries should not be discarded lightly. But in this case they are
unfounded.

I appreciate the analysis and explanation.  As you can see from the
exchange, I was only basing my suggestion on the comments left in the
Makefile by you when you did the "relocatable installation" topic.

So, I don't think that sysconfdir must survive. It was always only a
helper variable to shorten the code.

My remaining worry was if ./configure users accidentally relied on this
internal use of a variable whose name happens to be sysconfdir.  If so,

    $ ./configure --sysconfdir=/some/where

may give them a different result once we get rid of sysconfdir from our
Makefile.

But I notice that we do not say that sysconfdir is to be replaced in
config.mak.in we ship, so such a command line option would have been
silently discarded anyway.  IOW, no ./configure user would have relied on
what our build procedure does.

BUT.

The vanilla Makefile users might have.  Among those who install with
prefix=$HOME/git, there may be people who do not want to use $HOME/git/etc
and an obvious way to do so is by setting sysconfdir to $HOME/etc (an
alternative would be to set both ETC_GITCONFIG and ETC_GITATTRIBUTES).

So I think it would probably be a less-impact and useful solution to keep
sysconfdir and add "sysconfdir = @sysconfdir@" to config.mak.in as well.

Is Kacper's latest patch with an obvious one-liner to config.mak.in
sufficient to achieve that?

  From: Kacper Kornet [off-list ref]
  Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/1] Honor $(prefix) set in config.mak* when defin...
  Date: Wed, 4 May 2011 16:29:21 +0200
  Message-ID: [ref]