[build2] possible to do something similar to DESTDIR= make install?

[Boris Kolpackov]

Norbert Lange <nolange79 at gmail.com> writes:

> Just so you don`t get any wrong hopes - I am not an Debian maintainer [...]

No problem. It's good to work out the kinks plus your work could be used
as a starting point by someone else.


> 1) there is no easy way to clean the in-place build. Its needed one
>    way or the other.
>    Probably easiest if I just copy everything for now

I am not sure what you mean here. On step 2, after building a statically-
linked binary and renaming it to b-boot you should be able to clean things
without any problems.


> 2) running a b-boot clean after boostrap phase 2 will delete a few
>    version.hxx and version files (source files!).
>    Might check if thats a nasty bug?

Those are actually generated[1] (and we distribute pre-generated copies
for convenience). So this should be harmless.


> 3) first phase doesnt use threads, and is therefore rather slow.
>    Would be possibly to check if the competition is available, and
>    create a rather simple makefile.

We want to keep the bootstrap step as simple, portable, and reliable
as possible. And if it were easy to write a portable makefile, there
would be no need for build2. But maybe we should still do it, if only
for GNU make/Linux. Let me see what I can do.

Also, in the next version we plan to add support for dynamically-loadable
build system modules which will allow us to remove a few non-essential
modules from the bootstrap build. Hopefully this will make it a bit
faster.

[1] https://build2.org/build2/doc/build2-build-system-manual.xhtml#module-version

Boris