Hi list, but mainly Stephan :)

when building and subsequently installing the new Sieve plugin I am coming across a small difficulty when it comes to "make install". The libraries lib90_sieve_plugin.* always get installed in the directory /usr/local/lib/dovecot/lda, no matter what "prefix" argument is supplied to "make install". Only the libraries seem affected, not the rest of the Sieve plugin distribution (i.e. sieve, sievec, sieve-test, ...).

Background: I like using XStow [1] to manage packages built from source. With XStow one can configure and build software like Dovecot and Sieve as usual (./configure && make) but then install it under a custom directory/prefix, like /usr/local/stow/dovecot-1.2.5. The "prefix" argument for "make install" is used for this, i.e.:

make install prefix=/usr/local/stow/dovecot-1.2.5

XStow is then used to create symlinks to the correct places in the file system. For example the Dovecot binary gets installed in

/usr/local/stow/dovecot-1.2.5/sbin/dovecot

and a symbolic link is created by XStow:

/usr/local/sbin/dovecot -> ../stow/dovecot-1.2.5/sbin/dovecot

The advantages are clear: installing a software package is a matter of configuring, building and then installing under a custom directory, and letting XStow create symlinks. Updating is as easy as installing the new version in a parallel custom directory and letting XStow update the symlinks. Removing a software package just involves letting XStow remove the symlinks and doing an rm -rf on the custom directory. No more accidentally orphaned files or the need to keep the compiled source distribution around to be able to issue a "make uninstall".

Back to the problem: The Sieve source distribution seems to have some hard-coded setting to always install the libraries under /usr/local/lib/dovecot/lda and not honouring the "prefix" argument for "make install". This is probably a libtool issue, but I am not sure.

I know my way around the Autotools but here I am a bit lost. Looking at the generated Makefile in dovecot-1.2-sieve-0.1.12/src I can see the following:

moduledir = /usr/local/lib/dovecot/

It *should* look like this:

exec_prefix = ${prefix} ... moduledir = ${exec_prefix}/lib/dovecot/

This explains why the install prefix is not honoured here. The "moduledir" has already been hardcoded, instead of prefixed.

For comparison look at the Dovecot source distribution. Here all libraries are installed correctly under the specified prefix. An example is src/lib-sql. The generated Makefile includes these lines, which are correctly honouring the prefix:

exec_prefix = ${prefix} ... moduledir = ${exec_prefix}/lib/dovecot ... #sql_moduledir = $(moduledir)/sql AM_CPPFLAGS =
-I$(top_srcdir)/src/lib
-DMODULEDIR=\""$(moduledir)"\"
$(SQL_CFLAGS)

The last few lines seems to make sure that gcc uses the defined moduledir, but as usual generated code is not immediately comprehensible for the casual viewer :)

The top-level generated Makefile also contains a correctly defined moduledir:

moduledir = ${exec_prefix}/lib/dovecot

So, which knobs have to be turned to have the Sieve source distribution use a correct "moduledir" and not a hardcoded path?

I hope I could explain the problem correctly and haven't drawn any wrong conclusions here. I will continue to investigate this and maybe even provide a patch if I find a solution but it is probably easier for the maintainer and author of the build system to look at this and determine what to do.

Anyway, apologies for this lengthy post. I hope it wasn't too long to read.

Andreas

[1] http://xstow.sourceforge.net/

Andreas Ntaflos

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