Confusing behavior when installing into a parent directory

[TallJimbo]

When installing EUPS into a parent directory, the installer seems to blow away the parent and all the source code, causing a confusing failure.

To repeat, try this.

mkdir -p $HOME/eups/src
cd $HOME/eups/src
git clone [email protected]:RobertLuptonTheGood/eups.git
cd eups
./configure --prefix $HOME/eups --with-eups=$HOME/eups/stack
make
make install

It looks like make install deletes $HOME/eups/*, which of course includes the current directory containing the source.

This is not a serious issue - I can install into a subdirectory - but it took me a while to figure out what was going wrong.

[RobertLuptonTheGood]

eups checks that you aren't installing into ., but not for a parent. Does any installer check that you're not installing in a way that might overwrite the current directory?

[TallJimbo]

Well, in this case, it's deleting everything in $PREFIX, which is certainly not the behavior of most installers (which regularly install into e.g. PREFIX=/usr).

[RobertLuptonTheGood]

Hmm. Well, yes, I guess I buy that argument. I'll take a look.