Re: problem with subdir-objects and not found .Plo files when migrating to 1.14

[Sergey 'Jin' Bostandzhyan]

John,

On Sun, Sep 01, 2013 at 03:11:11PM -0600, John Calcote wrote:
> I'm curious as to why it's important to you that build products not land in 
> the
> source tree, especially in light of the fact that you're clearly aware of
> automake's support for out-of-tree builds. Out-of-tree builds exist to solve
> the very problem you're trying so hard to fix.

well, consider the following: your project has several source subdirectories,
some of them with two levels. Even with out of tree builts you end up
having the produced libraries and executables in each of those subdirectories
respectively, or in other words: all over the place. Sure, you can do a
make install to get all things together, but that's not always practical
during development.

My setup dumps all the compiled stuff into one directoriy, which makes it
really easy to find, it's just more convenient.

Honestly, if you have a choice, do you really prefer having the binaries all
in different places in your tree?

Also, I don't have to go out of the project dir when I want to "make"
which I would have to do if I configured out of tree.

What's wrong with that approach? People who use my setup seem to like it,
as I said, it's convenience, no matter if used with in or out of tree builds.
 
> Be aware that you're kicking against the pricks (as the old saying goes).
> Sooner or later you'll run into other issues with new versions of automake 
> that
> may not have such simple resolutions.

I wonder why the authors of automake would try to restrict different and
actually valid usage scenarios? I've been using this setup for over 5 years
in different projects, I'd be really disappointed if I had to switch to a
setup that is much more inconvenient for me.

Please don't become another Gnome 3 by enforcing weird restrictions upon your
users ;) Or is there really a hard technical limitation that would make
setups as above impossible? I can't believe that... so I hope I will have
the freedom of choice, also with newer versions of automake.

Kind regards,
Jin


> On Sep 1, 2013 11:53 AM, "Sergey Jin' Bostandzhyan" <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>     Hi,
> 
>     OK, never mind, problem solved. It seems that $(top_srcdir) simply did not
>     expand anymore in _SOURCES. Keeping my structure with the 
> build/Makefile.am
>     but replacing $(top_srcdir) with '..' did the trick, it works
>     like a charm now, including in and out of tree builds.
> 
>     No more warnings, no more not found .Po files, and I get my binaries and
>     libraries nicely in the build directory without polluting the source tree.
> 
>     Kind regards,
>     Jin
> 
>     On Sun, Sep 01, 2013 at 06:45:32PM +0200, Sergey 'Jin' Bostandzhyan wrote:
>     > Hi,
>     >
>     > thanks for your reply, some more questions though:
>     >
>     > On Sun, Sep 01, 2013 at 03:08:37PM +0100, Diego Elio Petten  wrote:
>     > >     Is it possible to keep the logic with the in-tree build directory
>     with
>     > >     automake 1.14? I did try to move all the logic from build/
>     Makefile.am into
>     > >     the top level Makefile.am and removing build/Makefile.am
>     completely, but
>     > >     it does not help - .Plo files are not found.
>     > >
>     > >
>     > > I'd say it's a very bad idea to use that build/Makefile.am.
>     >
>     > Could you please elaborate? I'd be interested in the technical details 
> on
>     why
>     > it is a bad idea?
>     >
>     > > Move the includes on the top-level Makefile.am, and get rid of $
>     (top_srcdir) on
>     > > all the _SOURCES declaration and it should work fine.
>     >
>     > It does compile now, and it does dump all the .o and .lo and what not
>     > in the same directory as the sources - very ugly. This is exactly what I
>     was
>     > avoiding with the separate build directory and it worked just perfectly
>     > until automake 1.14 came along.
>     >
>     > Is there any way to tell 1.14 to place the object files into some
>     dedicated
>     > directory without doing an actual "out of tree" build, or in other 
> words,
>     > can I achieve the same setup that I had on 1.14 somehow?
>     >
>     > Kind regards,
>     > Jin
>     >
> 
>