[tex-live] Building with altered prefix

[Ken Brooks]

I thought I understood that setting prefix=/usr was a good thing to do in 
a texlive build, and would build programs that expect to find texmf.cnf 
in /usr/share/ (among other places).  Not so simple.  When I do a default 
configure and build (which runs without error), I see that the Makefiles 
generated have prefix=/var/kenb/conary/builds/texlive/inst where 
/var/kenb/conary/builds/texlive is the top directory that contains the 
Build script.

If I set prefix=/usr, it tries to install things directly into /usr/bin, 
which is not allowed in my world at build time.

It would make the most sense if I could configure it to install into a 
builddir, i.e. where install to /usr/bin is translated into installing to 
$(BUILDDIR)/usr/bin.  Unfortunately, that seems to be supported in about 
1/3 of the Makefiles in the texlive world, leading to a thoroughly 
inconsistent result if I set BUILDDIR in the environment.  (BTW, I would 
encourage the Texlive maintainers to make this consistent in a future 
release.)

So, somehow I need to configure in such a way as to split apart:
A. the place where the built programs will look for the texmf tree, and
B. the place where things will be installed during the "make install" 
phase of Build.

Any guidance is much welcomed.

Ken Brooks
rPath, Inc.