"make install" scribbles outside the --prefix
Rationale and Background:
- It would be nice to be able to install multiple independent copies of gnumeric on the same machine, without bothering with full-blown virtual machines. This facilitates comparative testing.
- It would be nice if a non-root user could compile from scratch a working copy of gnumeric. Unix is supposed to be a multi-user operating system, usable by non-root users.
Expected behavior:
- I would expect the --prefix option to ./configure to produce the desired result.
Observed behavior:
- --prefix works as expected for libgsf and for goffice
- Alas, for gnumeric itself, "make install" insists on replacing certain system-wide files, no matter what --prefix says. Specifically, for a non-privileged user, the following errors are observed:
/usr/bin/install: cannot remove '/usr/share/gir-1.0/Gnm-1.12.gir': Permission denied
/usr/bin/install: cannot remove '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/girepository-1.0/Gnm-1.12.typelib': Permission denied
install: cannot remove '/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gi/overrides/Gnm.py': Permission denied
Is there some way around this? I looked at ./configure --help and didn't see anything relevant.
The full typescript is here: install-muggle.logg