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a Productive Parallel Programming Language
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Configure documentation inconsistent with behavior for `--prefix`? #26107

Open lydia-duncan opened 2 hours ago

lydia-duncan commented 2 hours ago

I've been trying to use configure when setting up distribution of a Chapel library compiled into a Python package. In the documentation for configure, it says:

--prefix=/dir/for/install/ causes the Chapel compiler, libraries, and supporting code to be installed into the directories:

`/dir/for/install/bin`

`/dir/for/install/lib`

`/dir/for/install/share`

This technique is designed to install Chapel using a standard directory structure for the purposes of integrating it into a standard location that is already in your path, such as /usr/local/ or ~/.

To me, this indicated that ~/ was a valid value to use. But if I use ./configure --prefix=~/, then I get the following message:

error: expected an absolute directory name for --prefix: ~/

Was that an incorrect expectation to have? Is this a bug? Or is this a sign we should adjust our documentation to not imply that?

jabraham17 commented 2 hours ago

This is possibly a bug introduced by https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel/pull/23576, where it looks like the code that explicitly handled ~/ was removed?

lydia-duncan commented 2 hours ago

Hmm, following that trail, it might even be intentional: https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel/issues/23271#issuecomment-1743471430

jabraham17 commented 2 hours ago

I guess that makes it clear we should address this by fixing the docs, not changing configure