Re: Time to update documentation regarding supported configuration styles?

[Phil Edwards <phil at jaj dot com>]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 09:27:50PM +0100, Laurent Guerby wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-03-14 at 21:02, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> > I would be entirely in favor of removing official build-in-srcdir 
> > support.  A lot of problems are created by srcdir=objdir on multilibbed 
> > ports only.  They're usually really, really, irritating to find and fix, 
> > if it's even possible.  Yet worse, some, mystifyingly, only show up on 
> > native builds.
> > 
> > If people like, we could even make 'configure' complain if 
> > srcdir=objdir. :-)
> 
> We could silently to mkdir BUILD, cd BUILD, ../configure --magic args
> that generate a dummy Makefile in srcdir that does cd BUILD; make args
> 
> :)

I don't know how to interpret the smiley, but on the off chance that people
are reading and weren't around the last time this issue came up:

This "convert to separate-objdir build and proceed normally" approach was
suggested by multiple people, implemented by myself, and overruled by one
of the build machinery maintainers on the theory that in-srcdir builds are
the "correct" method, and that new users (completely unfamiliar with GCC's
build setup) wouldn't know to look in BUILD when trying to debug a problem.
The patch was then reverted.

Before anyone tries to go down this road again, I advise searching the
archives of the last year or two.


Phil

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