How can I change the installation path of an autotools-based Bitbake recipe? - yocto

Question

I have an autotools-based BitBake recipe which I would like to have binaries installed in /usr/local/bin and libraries installed in /usr/local/lib (instead of /usr/bin and /usr/lib, which are the default target directories).
Here's a part of the autotools.bbclass file which I found important.
CONFIGUREOPTS = " --build=${BUILD_SYS} \
--host=${HOST_SYS} \
--target=${TARGET_SYS} \
--prefix=${prefix} \
--exec_prefix=${exec_prefix} \
--bindir=${bindir} \
--sbindir=${sbindir} \
--libexecdir=${libexecdir} \
--datadir=${datadir} \
--sysconfdir=${sysconfdir} \
--sharedstatedir=${sharedstatedir} \
--localstatedir=${localstatedir} \
--libdir=${libdir} \
...
I thought that the easiest way to accomplish what I wanted to do would be to simply change ${bindir} and ${libdir}, or perhaps change ${prefix} to /usr/local, but I haven't had any success in this area. Is there a way to change these installation variables, or am I thinking about this in the wrong way?
Update:
Strategy 1
As per Ross Burton's suggestion, I've tried adding the following to my recipe:
prefix="/usr/local"
exec_prefix="/usr/local"
but this causes the build to fail during that recipe's do_configure() task, and returns the following:
| checking for GLIB... no
| configure: error: Package requirements (glib-2.0 >= 2.12.3) were not met:
|
| No package 'glib-2.0' found
This package can be found during a normal build without these modified variables. I thought that adding the following line might allow the system to find the package metadata for glib:
PKG_CONFIG_PATH = " ${STAGING_DIR_HOST}/usr/lib/pkgconfig "
but this seems to have made no difference.
Strategy 2
I've also tried Ross Burton's other suggestion to add these variable assignments into my distribution's configuration file, but this causes it to fail during meta/recipes-extended/tzdata's do_install() task. It returns that DEFAULT_TIMEZONE is set to an invalid value. Here's the source of the error from tzdata_2015g.bb
# Install default timezone
if [ -e ${D}${datadir}/zoneinfo/${DEFAULT_TIMEZONE} ]; then
install -d ${D}${sysconfdir}
echo ${DEFAULT_TIMEZONE} > ${D}${sysconfdir}/timezone
ln -s ${datadir}/zoneinfo/${DEFAULT_TIMEZONE} ${D}${sysconfdir}/localtime
else
bberror "DEFAULT_TIMEZONE is set to an invalid value."
exit 1
fi
I'm assuming that I've got a problem with ${datadir}, which references ${prefix}.

Answer 1

Do you want to change paths for everything or just one recipe? Not sure why you'd want to change just one recipe to /usr/local, but whatever.
If you want to change all of them, then the simple way is to set prefix in your local.conf or distro configuration (prefix = "/usr/local").
If you want to do it in a particular recipe, then just assigning prefix="/usr/local" and exec_prefix="/usr/local" in the recipe will work.
These variables are defined in meta/conf/bitbake.conf, where you can see that bindir is $exec_prefix/bin, which is probably why assigning prefix didn't work for you.

Answer 2

Your first strategy was on the right track, but you were clobbering more than you wanted by changing only "prefix". If you look in sources/poky/meta/conf/bitbake.conf you'll find everything you are clobbering when you set the variable "prefix" to something other than "/usr" (like it was in my case). In order to modify only the install path with what would manually be the "--prefix" option to configure, I needed to set all the variables listed here in that recipe:
prefix="/your/install/path/here"
datadir="/usr/share"
sharedstatedir="/usr/com"
exec_prefix="/usr"