Fixing a bug in Synaptics driver but autogen ignores prefix

[Peter Hutterer]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2020 at 07:29:29PM +0100, Andrea G. Monaco wrote:
> 
>  >  I don't think there's a configure flag for it but you can hack around that
>  >  locally.
> 
> 
> Thanks Peter, now I found it.
> 
> But I'm still perplexed: I think that a software package should fully
> respect the prefix it is given at configuration time.
> Think about the most common GNU+Linux distributions: they usually put
> package files as managed by their package systems under the /usr tree and
> leave /usr/local for software built locally, for example using the
> autotools (which in fact use /usr/local as default prefix).
> 
> What do you think about modifying this? Could it break something else?

historically, many users who installed drivers in different prefixes than
the X server ended up with a nonworking display server stack. while it's
possible to install a driver in /usr/local and then point the server to it
it's more fiddly and has more avenues of going wrong. This again results in
more bug reports which few people have the time to help with and overall a
worse experience. This is doubly so with unmaintained parts of the stack
(like the synaptics driver).

So while it's cleaner to install in /usr/local, I'd say just bite the bullet
and install in the xserver prefix. if you don't have the system-provided
synaptics package installed, it won't get overwritten on updates anyway.

Cheers,
   Peter