Re: Out-of-tree builds?

[Yavor Doganov]

В Tue, 20 Mar 2018 13:04:15 +0000, David Chisnall написа:

> For most projects, I would do this by using out-of-tree builds, but
> this doesn’t appear to work for GNUstep.  Is there a mechanism for
> doing this that I can’t find, or is it just a limitation of the
> build system?

It is easy to add support for it for any GNUstep project that is using
GNU Autoconf:

- Add GNUmakefile to AC_CONFIG_FILES
- Incorporate all the auxiliary makefiles (.preamble/.postamble/etc)
  into the main makefile; alternatively add them to AC_CONFIG_FILES as
  well
- Add the following line to the makefile

  srcdir := @srcdir@

- Adjust all variables to honor srcdir, for example instead of

  foo_OBJC_FILES = foo.m \
  bar.m \
  maude.m

  write

  foo_OBJC_FILES = $(addprefix $(srcdir)/, \
  bar.m \
  maude.m)

Of course all of this should be done automatically and behind the
scenes by GNUstep Make.  I fully agree that out-of-tree builds have
many valuable applications and most people quite reasonably expect
this feature.  It should work out of the box for any sane build
system.

A different approach would be to play with the vpath GNU make
directive but makefiles must be in builddir in any case.