make install DESTDIR

[Thomas Jollans]

On Saturday 21 August 2010, it occurred to aj to exclaim:
> On Aug 20, 4:39 pm, Thomas Jollans <tho... at jollybox.de> wrote:
> > On Saturday 21 August 2010, it occurred to aj to exclaim:
> > > I am trying to install python with make install DESTDIR=/home/blah
> > > 
> > >                 --prefix=/
> > 
> > ...
> > 
> > > creating /lib/python2.6
> > > error: could not create '/lib/python2.6': Permission denied
> > > make: *** [sharedinstall] Error 1
> > 
> > Obviously, the flags you specified didn't have the effect you intended.
> > 
> >   --prefix=$HOME
> > 
> > should do the trick.
> 
> The whole point of DESTDIR is that it should be prepended to all
> installed paths, but the binaries should not contain any references to
> it.DESTDIR is commonly used by packagers, for example, to allow
> installation without superuser privileges.

Sorry, that feature slipped my mind.

So, are you running 
$ make install DESTDIR=/home/foo/bar

or are you trying to directly run setup.py? I just tried and use make worked 
for me. (though I was in a Python 3.2 dev source tree, not 2.6 -- maybe this 
was a bug that has been fixed?)