[Sugar-devel] About the build out-of-source-directory patches

[Daniel Narvaez]

Hello,

this is a follow up of the development meeting. Sascha had some
question about my build out-of-source directory patches.

>IIRC, we're a) missing some explanation of the overall picture (what do we want to solve, how do we solve it in sugar, why do we solve it this way, what other >changes are needed?) and b) previous review comments were applied only partially

a)
My own need is that by building out-of-source directory I can speed up
sugar-build a lot because I don't need to pull the sources every time.
I can clean build and install and the tree is fully clean.
But it's often just a developer preference to build stuff that way.
Build out-of-source directory is a very common convention in auto*
projects, and fully supported by most of them, I never had issue
getting patches accepted to fix it.
I really see no reason sugar should not support it. Especially because
it almost completely supports it already (otherwise you couldn't
distcheck), it's just the autogen.sh bits which are broken. It's a bug
fix, not a new feature.
No other changes will be necessary.
b) Can you elaborate please?

>re why do we solve it this way? addressing why we don't just go the ./setup.py (distutils) route right away would be good, too.

I'm not interested in evaluating the merits of a build system rewrite
right now. I'm proposing a very simple, uncontroversial patch on the
top of what is there. If we believe it's important to switch to
distutils let's do it at some point, but I don't see why it should
block incremental improvements of what we have.

Thanks

-- 
Daniel Narvaez