Build system (was: [PATCH] Have to configure and build inside the source directory.)

[Thomas Schwinge]

Hallo!

On Sat, 29 Jan 2011 06:58:59 +1000, Carl Worth <cworth at cworth.org> wrote:
> Rather than documenting a limitation here, why don't we do what people
> actually want.

Well, not a big deal for me -- I'm just used to building projects
containing a configure file outside of the source tree, and the notmuch
build machinery at first accepted this, but then fell over.


> What do other build systems generally do when running configure from
> some other directory?

What Rob said -- but: why re-invent Autoconf / Automake if it's already
there?  I totally admit that the GNU Autotools have their ugly corners
(and indeed a lot of these), but on the other hand they do solve some
issues quite nicely.

You surely had reasons to not use these tools, and that's fine with me.
(And I'm not especially interested in working on build systems -- done
that enough in the past.)  Have you looked at other tools before going
for the straight-forward (and that is very fine!) Makefile-based
solution?


Grüße,
 Thomas
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