GNU Emacs
---------
Although the Free Software Foundation has many enlightened practices
regarding Makefiles and software installation (see Note:Other FSF
software), Emacs, its flagship program, doesn't quite follow the
rules. In particular, most GNU software allows you to write:
make
make install prefix=/usr/local/stow/PACKAGE
If you try this with Emacs, then the new value for `prefix' in the
`make install' step will cause some files to get recompiled with the
new value of `prefix' wired into them. In Emacs 19.23 and later,(1)
the way to work around this problem is:
make
make install-arch-dep install-arch-indep prefix=/usr/local/stow/emacs
In 19.22 and some prior versions of Emacs, the workaround was:
make
make do-install prefix=/usr/local/stow/emacs
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) As I write this, the current version of Emacs is 19.31.