amend transactions programmatically

[Russell Gadd]

Josh Sled wrote:
> Russell Gadd <russ.mail.lists at googlemail.com> writes:
>>> My only suggestion is that I'd recommend you use a --prefix during
>>> configure to make it easier to remove that version of gnucash later.
>>> Also, using --prefix will prevent "dirtying" /usr/local, and you can
>>> set it up so you don't need to 'sudo' to "make install"
>>>
>> This is beyond me - I don't understand --prefix. Maybe people used to 
>> compiling can follow this?
>> Not sure why /usr/local shouldn't be dirtied. A cleaner solution would 
>> presumably do it properly and build a package.
> 
> --prefix just sets the prefix path appended to all paths during install.  So,
> a --prefix of "/foobar" would install the software into /foobar/bin/,
> /foobar/lib/, /foobar/share/, &c.
> 
> Installing it into something not shared like /opt/gnucash-svn/ means that
> if/when you want to remove all traces of it, you can do `rm -Rf
> /opt/gnucash-svn`.  If the software is installed in /usr/local/ (or /usr/)
> without using a package manager that tracks all the files that got installed,
> it's basically impossible to remove it from the system.
> 
Didn't appreciate this - I agree it is better. Have just read what /opt 
is for and have learnt something new today - thanks.

I assume my ./configure line should be extended to :
  ./configure --prefix=/opt/gnucash

Do I need a / at the end?

The only problem with amending the wiki it is that I haven't actually 
used this whereas I have done what I have described in the wiki. Maybe I 
should add a caveat somewhere rather than put it in the main instruction 
list?


Russell