Re: deprecation of in-tree builds

[Peter Maydell]

On Thu, 20 Aug 2020 at 12:56, Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On 20/08/20 12:54, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> >> Paolo's conversion-to-Meson patchseries is about to land, so now
> >> is the time for people who would like this "automatically create
> >> a build directory and use it" behaviour to write the necessary
> >> patches. Any volunteers ?
> >>
> >> My current plan is to land the Meson series first, because it is
> >> really painful for Paolo to try to keep rebasing it as other
> >> changes to the old build system occur. This would break
> >> in-tree builds temporarily until the "automatic creation and
> >> use of a builddir" patches go in on top of it.
> >
> > Usually, our requirement is that patch series don't break anything. And
> > if something slips through, whoever broke it is supposed to fix it, not
> > whoever is affected.
>
> The Meson conversion was announced in October 2019 as breaking in-tree
> builds, and the deprecation request is from March 2020.  So I don't
> think this is a breakage but rather a widely-announced change.

No, we need to put in the back-compat for making basic in-source-tree
configure/make/make install work. There was a fair amount of discussion
of this on-list and the clear consensus was that it was widely
enough used, that it wouldn't be a huge amount of work to make it
do a behind-the-scenes creation of the buildir, and that we should
retain it.

thanks
-- PMM