addendum. if dbus-daemon has to be installed _maybe_ would be clean put it in the proper target.

Created attachment 14763 [details] [review]
bus/Makefile.am cleanup patch

I tried to do the cleanup myself, seems working fine

(In reply to comment #0)
> ## we use noinst_PROGRAMS not check_PROGRAMS so that we build 
> ## even when not doing "make check"

The comment indicates that that's deliberate (presumably to stop the tests bit-rotting because nobody ever compiles them - that's typically the reason for doing this).

(In reply to comment #1)
> addendum. if dbus-daemon has to be installed _maybe_ would be clean put it in
> the proper target.

Yes, that part of your patch is clearly an improvement. Unfortunately, bus/Makefile.am has been reorganised since then and the patch no longer applies; I'll attach a revised patch that makes similar changes.

Created attachment 43758 [details] [review]
Install dbus-daemon and dbus-daemon-launch-helper in the conventional way

Also remove some pointless indirection (extra_tests etc.), don't install
the unused directory $(libexecdir)/dbus-1 (we actually install the
launch helper directly into $(libexecdir)), and allow dbus_daemondir to be
set on Windows rather than forcing dbus-daemon to be installed to
$(bindir) there.

(Note that with this patch, the tests are conditional on DBUS_BUILD_TESTS, which is off for production builds of D-Bus.)

Created attachment 44710 [details] [review]
Rename dbus_daemondir to dbus_daemon_execdir so it's installed by install-exec

Additional patch (which I'll squash into the previous one for commit) to make install-exec work normally.

Comment on attachment 43758 [details] [review]
Install dbus-daemon and dbus-daemon-launch-helper in the conventional way

>From 9ace46e147d1ce10f1051839fa63ab0abcaf6541 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
>From: Simon McVittie <simon.mcvittie@collabora.co.uk>
>Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2011 17:02:12 +0000
>Subject: [PATCH] Install dbus-daemon and dbus-daemon-launch-helper in the conventional way

This all looks quite clean and correct to me.

(In reply to comment #6)
> Created an attachment (id=44710) [details]
> Rename dbus_daemondir to dbus_daemon_execdir so it's installed by install-exec
> 
> Additional patch (which I'll squash into the previous one for commit) to make
> install-exec work normally.

Looks fine, but who cares about install-exec?  Is that target used for Debian's multiarch stuff?

Thanks, merged to dbus-1.4 for 1.4.10, and will soon also arrive in master for 1.5.2.

(In reply to comment #8)
> who cares about install-exec?

I was using it to divert off a secondary (verbose/debug-enabled) build of dbus into /usr/lib/dbus-1.0/debug-build, so you can install dbus-dbg and add /usr/lib/dbus-1.0/debug-build/bin to $PATH if things aren't working and you need more info (in a Maemo environment it's much easier if everything you need is already in some not-installed-by-default package, rather than having to do a special compile). We've had a bug report asking for the same thing in Debian, in fact.