Confused about build proceedure srcdir vs objdir

[lange92@2067.resnet.uni.edu]

On Sun, 28 Oct 2001, Harry Putnam wrote:

> Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> writes:
>
> > Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:
> >
> >>    We use srcdir to refer to the toplevel directory of GCC package.
> >>    (Top level of unpacked GCC.tar.gz)
> >>
> >>    We use `builddir' to refer to a user created sub-directory under
> >>    the top level directory of GCC package.  We recommend running the
> >>    compile from `builddir'.
> >
> > Certainly not! objdir/builddir may not be a directory under srcdir,
> > otherwise the build process will fail in very obscure ways.  (Yes,
> > I've made this mistake before.)
>
> Yikes, I meant the other way round?  In the configure.html it
> appears as if srcdir is a subdirectory of objdir:
>
>    To configure GCC:
>    % mkdir objdir
>    % cd objdir
>    % srcdir/configure [options] [target]
>
> If one were to cd into objdir and call: `srcdir/configure' then srcdir
> would need to be a subdir of objdir.  Is this correct?

No. you can (and probably should) specify scrdir with an absolute path
(one that starts with a /) So the srcdir actually has no relation
to where the objdir is, and vice versa.