Re: deprecation of in-tree builds

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 20/08/20 15:30, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> So without that, and also without a mention in deprecated.rst, I don't
> think having mentioned a wish to break things a while ago means that we
> should just follow through with that despite the objections.
> 
> At least this isn't how it has worked for other patch series. If it is
> the new standard, I can remove -drive tomorrow. I've been mentioning for
> years that I don't like it and want to remove it, so people can just
> deal with it.

Come on, you're too smart to say that seriously.  The deprecation policy
only applies to user-visible features, users don't care if ./configure
&& make works.  (There is precedent for that: the switch from "make
subdir-*" to "make */all" was never included in user-visible documentation).

I hate to say this but if the Meson conversion does not land in the next
few days (I will disappear again on Saturday) I'm just going to drop it
on the floor and let people have fun with their Makefiles.

I have already spent the last 3 weeks on it almost full time and I
cannot really justify, to both myself and my employer, spending much
more time on a build system rather than fixing real bugs[1] or doing
shiny new stuff.

Paolo

[1] Though there's plenty of known bugs in the Makefiles that are now fixed.