[libvirt] RFC: should we mandate use of VPATH builds ?

[Jiri Denemark]

On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 13:29:35 +0000, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> One of the things we (well I) constantly screw up is VPATH builds. I've
> always tended to just build in the source tree, and as a result I'll
> often miss changes which break VPATH builds.
> 
> Now our Jenkins CI catches this because it does VPATH builds only, so we
> don't bit-rot for very long.  Unfortunately Travis CI does source tree
> builds only so I don't notice my mistakes when I test branches on Travis
> before pushing.  I'll fix Travis to do VPATH builds too, but....

I think most Linux distributions build their packages in tree and also
./configure && make && make install is the well known way of building
software. I don't think we should break it.

> We could even make it such that autogen.sh will actually create a subdir
> "build" and change into it automatically before running configure, to
> help devs do the "right thing" by default.

I don't this is a good idea. It would make using other directory than
./build harder and it won't help developers much anyway since they will
need to change all their paths to the built binaries they want to
execute.

Jirka