Re: deprecation of in-tree builds

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 08:14:33PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Mar 2020 at 13:32, Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Sat, Mar 21, 2020 at 11:50:23PM +0100, BALATON Zoltan wrote:
> > > This was discussed before. I think instead of annoying people with a
> > > warning, rather configure should be changed to create a build dir if run
> > > from source and have a Makefile in top dir that runs make -C builddir so
> > > people don't have to care about this or change their ways and can continue
> > > to run configure && make from source dir but you don't have to support
> > > in-tree build. Then you can deprecate in-tree builds but supporting only
> > > out-of-tree without this convenience would not just unnecessarily annoy
> > > those who prefer working in a single tree but people (and apparently some
> > > tools) expect sources to build with usual configure; make; make install so
> > > that should be the minimum to support.
> >
> > Yes, please!  I use in-tree builds and find it tedious to cd into a
> > build dir manually.
> >
> > Also, many build scripts (packaging, etc) we'll break if we simply
> > remove in-tree builds.  I think make && make install should continue to
> > work.
> 
> 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 ?

I'll try to come up with some GNUmakefile that isn't entirely
awful as a starting point to at least get

   ./configure
   make
   make test

to work, leaving symlinks to the biult ELF binaries in $PWD.

We can then iterate on it if desired.

> 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.
> 
> thanks
> -- PMM
> 

Regards,
Daniel
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