Proposed change to ghc installation procedures

[Manuel M. T. Chakravarty]

"Julian Seward (Intl Vendor)" <v-julsew@microsoft.com> wrote,

> The purpose of this message is to show the proposed changes and
> find out if it will cause problems for people.  Up till now, the
> installation procedure (eg with 4.08.2) was
> 
>    gzip -dc ghc-4.08.2-my-platform-descriptor.tar.gz | tar xvf -
>    cd ghc-4.08.2
>    ./configure --prefix=/where/ghc/should/be/installed
>    make install
> 
> The proposed new installation scheme is in fact a return to an
> old scheme:
> 
>    gzip -dc ghc-4.08.2-my-platform-descriptor.tar.gz | tar xvf -
>    and then
>    edit by hand ghc-4.08.2/bin/my-platform-descriptor/ghc5
>    to set the GHC_TOPDIR env variable to point to the top of the
>    installation tree.
> 
> So you run the distributed image in-place.  The initial edit of the
> ghc5 script allows it to know where it is installed.  

I think, this is great, because then we can finally have
relocatable rpms.  So, people without root access can
install from rpm.

How about providing a script `settop' that given a directory
path does the editing of 

  ghc-4.08.2/bin/my-platform-descriptor/ghc5 

(This would be exactly what is required as a post install
script for a relocatable rpm and might be convenient for
manual installation, too.)

Manuel