Transferring discussion to a task for later.

The problem with installing in ~/.mozilla/plugins is that it's a user directory, while make install is typically done as root. People that don't use sudo for various reasons run make install with su -c, which makes the process run by the root user. Configure, run as the user, sets it to be the right user directory, but the created files and directories are owned by root and unwriteable by the user.

Plus, source-based package managers usually configure, make, and install packages as root, so it'd be put into root's home directory where users can't even look. Installing packages from package managers shouldn't go about putting plugins into user directories because the package managers operate system wide.

IMHO, make install should put the plugin into the correct directory as prefixed with --prefix or whatever (global by default), and if a user wants to install the plugin on a single user, they'd copy it from the gnash directory where it was built to the browser's user plugin directory. So perhaps a configure option to disable installing a plugin while still building it, and there could be user-run install scripts to copy the built lib to the correct user directory automatically. So something like:

./configure --disable-plugin-install (configures and sets to not install the plugin)
make (build the libs and plugin)
su -c "make install" (install the libs)
./install-mozilla-plugin [user name] (install the built plugin to the given user's local plugin dir)

Currently it does get installed in ~/.mozilla/plugins, as all browsers look there. We also did copy the mozilla SDK for NSAPI to the plugin directory so people don't have to install that package. The reason we install in the users home directory is otherwise, they'd have to be root, and the changes would be global.