Linux – Arch Linux: Why people do not do “make install” in PKGBUILD

arch linuxaurdkmsmakepkgbuild

I'm analyzing different PKGBUILDs to learn creating packages for Arch. I saw in a lot of them, that they do make on sources, and then manually copy files in the different places with the install command, instead of running make install. Is there a reason for it?

Examples:

Best Answer

Well for one, these are dkms packages, and the actual make/etc is handled via dkms at install time, not make time.

For another reason, perhaps the Makefile itself is rather shoddy itself and would not work/could not be made to work with arch linux's packaging standards.

If you check out more repo PKGBUILDs you may find more that actually do use make install DESTDIR=${pkgdir}, where ${pkgdir} resolves to the root directory that is tar'd up under fakeroot to set proper permissions during the package() function of the PKGBUILD

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