Re: deprecation of in-tree builds

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 30/03/20 16:37, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> If manually dealing with separate build directories is inconvenient
> today, it will still be inconvenient with Meson, so this would mean
> introducing the automatic directly creation together with the other
> changes to enable Meson. Which is fine by me, as long as it is really
> done when the external directory becomes mandatory, so that people won't
> have to switch back and forth between directories.

Serious question: why is automatic directly creation more convenient for
developers?  Even if "./configure" generates a "build" directory for
you, you would still have to invoke the QEMU binary as
"build/x86_64-softmmu/qemu-system-x86_64".  That is less convenient than
doing "mkdir build" in the first place.

I can see why it's more convenient for packaging, as they just invoke
"make" and "make install", but as far as developers are concerned it
seems to add complexity for little or no gain.

Thanks,

Paolo