Re: Build directory option for configure script

[Karl Berry]

Hi Eric and all,

    Your idea may make sense, but I'd first like to have an opinion from the
    folks that maintain the GNU Coding Standards

rms is the only "maintainer" of the coding standards, in the sense of
being empowered to make nontrivial changes.  (I get to make trivial
changes. :)

    I worry slightly that making VPATH builds triggered by a one-liner
    might backfire with more reports of people having failed builds when
    they weren't familiar with the risks of a VPATH build.

I agree with you, FWIW.  Do we really want to complicate autoconf and
friends for this "syntactic sugar" option?  It seems to me that the
current process is not overly burdensome -- running a couple of commands
instead of specifying an option.  If someone does it so often that it
gets to be annoying, they can do their own trivial shell script.

But I don't feel all that strongly about it myself.  If there's a
consensus you (autoconfers) like to do it, I'll ask rms.

k