[tex-live] Building with altered prefix

[Karl Berry]

    encourage the Texlive maintainers to make this consistent in a future 

It would definitely be nice, but it's not really up to the "TL
maintainers" (aka me, basically, for this part anyway); I can't fix
everyone's Makefile to support DESTDIR properly.  It's hard enough just
to get configure && make to work.  I can only encourage you to report
lack of DESTDIR support to the appropriate maintainers ...

For the actual TL-written Makefiles, of which there are some, I can add
the DESTDIR support, which I think is lacking.  Was that right?

    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.

I have never tried to do something like this, but here is what comes to
mind.  Do the configure --prefix=/usr.  Stash away texmf.cnf and
texmf.cnf.in.  (I think those are all the files that matter, but could
easily be forgetting something.)

Then wipe that build tree out, and do
configure --prefix=/your/dest/prefix.  Copy in
the stashed texmf.*.  Do the make and make install, and see what you get.

Another, completely different idea: do the configure --prefix=/usr and
make.  Then do
make bindir=/your/install/bindir datadir=/your/install/datadir ... install

Sorry, I can't think of any "nice" way to handle this.

Regards,
Karl