Re: deprecation of in-tree builds

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Sat, Mar 21, 2020 at 11:50:23PM +0100, BALATON Zoltan wrote:
> On Sat, 21 Mar 2020, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > AIUI from Paolo, the intention is to deprecate and eventually
> > stop supporting "in-tree" builds, so that the only option is
> > building in a separate build directory. I thought we should
> > probably mention that in the 5.0 changelog, so I wrote up some
> > text:
> > 
> > https://wiki.qemu.org/ChangeLog/5.0#Build_Information
> > 
> > Suggestions for changes/comments etc welcome.
> > 
> > (One thing we will need to fix before we can do separate build
> > tree is the Coverity Scan build process, which (a) does an
> > in-tree build (b) can't be easily switched to a builddir because
> > all the source paths get baked into the scan results and moving
> > to a builddir changes them all...)
> > 
> > We could also make configure actively warn if used in
> > the source tree.
> 
> 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.

Stefan

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