Problems with "make install"

[Eli Zaretskii]

I'm testing the "make install" targets, and I see several problems
which look like bugs.

1) gdb/Makefile doesn't seem to run mkinstalldirs to create some of
the directories, such as ${prefix}/bin and ${prefix}/man.  Similarly,
gdb/doc/Makefile doesn't create ${prefix}/info and ${prefix}/html.
Why is that?

2) Why doesn't "make install" install the Info docs?  For that matter,
why doesn't "make" doesn't "make info"?  One needs to say "make info"
and "make install-info" to get them, which is different from all the
other GNU project I've seen.

3) The top-level Makefile.in says this:

  INSTALL = $(SHELL) $$s/install-sh -c

This unconditionally forces Make to use the install-sh script for
installation, including in all the subdirectories.

Why is this necessary?  Is it possible to replace this with the usual
Autoconf magic that finds the install program at configure time?  (All
the subdirectories already do that, but the results of those tests are
overridden by the above.)

My problem with this is that install-sh is truncated to "install-" on
8+3 filesystems, and Make then doesn't think it's necessary to run the
commands for targets like install-recursive because it thinks that
install-recursive is a file which already exists.  So the DJGPP
configuration script renames install-sh to a different name, which
then fails because of the above.

Using the normal install program would solve all that nuisance.