Build system

[Michal Sojka]

On Tue, 08 Feb 2011, Thomas Schwinge wrote:
> On Sun, 30 Jan 2011 21:14:39 +1000, Carl Worth <cworth at cworth.org> wrote:
> > On Sun, 30 Jan 2011 11:28:08 +0100, Thomas Schwinge <thomas at schwinge.name> wrote:
> > > Still, my point holds that (unless someone is willing to spend time on
> > > this, of course) we shouldn't try to replicate the Autotools, but instead
> > > keep our system as simple as it currently is, and thus just have it fail
> > > if configured outside of the source tree.
> > 
> > Oh, I agree that if we don't support this then we should give the user a
> > nice error message. But I think it will actually be very easy to add
> > support for this. (And at this point, I think the notmuch build system
> > is something that other projects could emulate if they want. I don't
> > think it's too crazt).
> 
> Is the testsuite also easy to convert to VPATH style builds?  (I don't
> know, but would expect some difficulties.)

It won't be easy to run the tests in different directory, but the
following approach might be sufficient: When notmuch is configured and
compiled in a different directory, then running `make test` there could
run the tests in the original directory but the tests will invoke the
notmuch binary from where it was compiled.

If you send the patch for out-of-source compilation, I'll modify the
test suite to work with it.

-Michal