LinLog

I guess sometimes it does pay to read the installation scripts. While trouble-shooting my installation of Opera 8.0 beta 3, I came across a link in the Opera forums to the pre-announcement build of Opera 8.0 final. (They announced the Windows version on OSNews, but they haven't always released the Linux version at the same time.) I downloaded it and, instead of directly running the installer as root, commenced building a Slackware package, as I do for just about everything I install.

Well, after having problems with the third beta release of Opera 8, I decided that instead of installing to a prefix and then grepping for any files that contain a wrong path, I would just look at the install.sh script and see if I could simply modify it to use a destination directory in addition to an install prefix. You know, on the off chance that I somehow screwed up the last installation when I made the package. Well, it turns out that the install script already supports a destination directory, it just isn't documented in the help message. It turns out that you can just run:
install.sh DESTDIR=/path/to/destdir

Imagine my surprise! Here I've been, editing the launcher script like an idiot for years when there was already an option to do what I want! Live and learn, I guess.