[m-dev.] mercury installation

[Dimitar Kenanov]

Hi,

came across mercury and read the intro book, i liked what i saw so 
decided to give it a go :)

Downloaded the source and tried to compile it. So i encountered the 
following problem.

I like to install my compiled programs in /opt. So i used prefix option 
in configure. But then the Makefile complained that DESTDIR is 
undefined. So the easy solution was to change the line in Makefile:

from: $(MMAKE) MMAKEFLAGS=$(PARALLEL) DESTDIR=$(DESTDIR) install
to  : $(MMAKE) MMAKEFLAGS=$(PARALLEL) install

This way i get my /opt/mercury directory and bin,info etc are in it. 
Else if i set up DESTDIR in Makefile some weird things are happening in 
INSTALL_DIR :)

Also figured out that setting up PARALLEL=-jN directly in the Makefile 
works pretty well and speeds up the installation.

I write to you guys because today i was reading about a user who was 
complaining that the installation is a bit strange and slow. So i 
thought this might help other users to install mercury a bit easier. So 
explaining these things a bit better to the users might persuade them to 
give it go :)


On the side, one practical question. Do you think mercury is suitable 
for bioinformatics? I still cant decide.

Hope the language gets more attention!

Cheers
Dimitar