[EMBOSS] RootDirectory and BaseDirectory hardcoded at build time ?

[Peter Rice]

Charles Plessy wrote:
> Dear EMBOSS developers,
> 
> I realised some time ago that when using the Debian 'emboss' package,
> embossversion would report wrong RootDirectory and BaseDirectory because the
> binaries are built in a temporary location before being moved in the package
> and installed on downstream computers:
> 
> aqwa$ embossversion -full
> Writes the current EMBOSS version number to a file
> PackageName: EMBOSS
> LibraryVersion: 6.0.1
> InstallDirectory: /usr
> RootDirectory: /tmp/buildd/emboss-6.0.1/emboss
> BaseDirectory: /tmp/buildd/emboss-6.0.1/
> 
> Using 'strace' and 'strings', I figured out that this information is hard-coded
> in libajax. Is there a way to indicate the final location (/usr/share/EMBOSS?)
> at build time?

The values are defined at build time. You can override them with
settings in emboss.defaults (the easiest way) as EMBOSS_ROOT (the base
directory is simply one level up). embossversion will report
these values. This is the usual way where EMBOSS installations have been 
moved.

The directories are defined from the --prefix setting when you run
./configure and we have not needed to define alternatives as the above
method works.

Of course, you could try hard coding any value you like in ajnam.c but
we wouldn't recommend that!

Hope that helps,

Peter