Re: deprecation of in-tree builds

[Peter Maydell]

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 ?

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