libX11 and libXext (at least) fail using prefix on make install

[Dan Nicholson]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 3:12 AM, Garry Iglesias
<garry.iglesias at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Sorry if this problem has already been mentioned, but I couldn't find
> any question nor bug about it...
>
> I'm building a libX11 and libXext as static libraries in a local tree as
> third party dependencies of a framework I'm working on. It's been
> working like a charm for 3 years, but I recently (yesterday) upgraded
> to the last versions of the libs. And I encounter a failure on install:
>  make install doesn't use the prefix and try to write directly into
> /usr/share/ which is a problem:
>
> ============================================
> libX11 build log:
>
> [...]
> Making install in libX11
> make[2]: Entering directory
> `/shared-a/nshq/dev/ns2/third-party/Xlib/libX11-1.4.3/specs/libX11'
> make[3]: Entering directory
> `/shared-a/nshq/dev/ns2/third-party/Xlib/libX11-1.4.3/specs/libX11'
> make[3]: Nothing to be done for `install-exec-am'.
> test -z "/home/giglesias/development/ns2/third-party/build/share/doc/libX11"
> || /usr/bin/mkdir -p
> "/home/giglesias/development/ns2/third-party/build/share/doc/libX11"
>  /usr/bin/ginstall -c -m 644 libX11.xml AppA.xml AppB.xml AppC.xml
> AppD.xml CH01.xml CH02.xml CH03.xml CH04.xml CH05.xml CH06.xml
> CH07.xml CH08.xml CH09.xml CH10.xml CH11.xml CH12.xml CH13.xml
> CH14.xml CH15.xml CH16.xml credits.xml glossary.xml
> '/home/giglesias/development/ns2/third-party/build/share/doc/libX11'
> test -z "/usr/share/sgml/X11/dbs" || /usr/bin/mkdir -p "/usr/share/sgml/X11/dbs"
>  /usr/bin/ginstall -c -m 644 libX11.html.db libX11.fo.db
> '/usr/share/sgml/X11/dbs'
> /usr/bin/ginstall: cannot remove
> `/usr/share/sgml/X11/dbs/libX11.html.db': Permission denied

I think this must be picking up your host's pkg-config file for
xorg-sgml-doctools that determine where to install the cross reference
databases for the documents. Do you see the following line during
configure?

checking for X.Org SGML entities >= 1.7... /usr/share/sgml

The fix is either to install a new copy of xorg-sgml-doctools for your
prefix before libX11/libXext, or just disable the build of the spec
docs with --disable-specs. If you're just installing X as a
dependency, you may not care about the spec docs (they take a long
time to build, too). I think the next release of these modules will
have that fixed so the files follow --prefix, but I don't know when
that will be.

--
Dan