Obsolete building in source dir?

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Wed, 2004-09-15 at 22:29, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> On Sep 14, 2004, DJ Delorie <dj@redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> >> Could someone remind me what was wrong with the "if configure
> >> notices it's been invoked in the source directory, create a build
> >> directory behind the user's back" idea?  That wouldn't break all the
> >> time.
> 
> > It's the "behind the user's back" that's a problem.  I think that we
> > should either make it do what the user expected, or tell the user they
> > can't do that, but to do something the user doesn't expect is bad.
> 
> What if we changed the top-level machinery such that, instead of using
> a directory such as `gcc' to build GCC for the host, it used say
> `host-gcc', just like we use `build-libiberty' for libiberty built for
> the build machine?  Then nothing would be configured/built in the
> source tree, except for the top-level, that isn't sensitive to these
> matters.
Instead of doing this you could consider to systematically using
$host(_alias), $build(_alias), $target(_alias) builddir-subdirectories,
no matter if cross-compiling or not.

Ralf