Featurerequest: building GNUstep-base in a separate objdir

[Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf]

Why would somebody want to do this? First, you can have several 
distinct objdirs at the same time (to try different configurations in 
parallel for instance without the need to clean each time), second, the 
srcdir doesn't get cluttered with the build results which is good if 
you make changes to some files from which you might create patches by 
using diff between a clean srcdir and a changed one. Convinced?

However, I tried to build GNUstep-base in a separate objdir (that is a 
dir at the same level as the srcdir) like gcc is build for instance:

mkdir build/base
cd build/base/
../../core/base/configure --disable-do CC='/opt/local/bin/gcc'
make

which resulted in:

make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found.  Stop.

This is obiviously due to the fact that that the makefile resides in 
srcdir:

localhost:~/GNUstep-Darwin/build/base lars$ ls -al 
../../core/base/Makefile
-rw-r--r--  1 lars  staff  1028  8 Sep  1999 ../../core/base/Makefile

but is missing from the objdir:

localhost:~/GNUstep-Darwin/build/base lars$ ls -al
total 456
drwxr-xr-x  9 lars  staff     306  1 Oct 18:43 .
drwxr-xr-x  5 lars  staff     170  2 Oct 07:52 ..
drwxr-xr-x  3 lars  staff     102  1 Oct 18:43 Headers
drwxr-xr-x  6 lars  staff     204  1 Oct 18:43 SSL
drwxr-xr-x  3 lars  staff     102  1 Oct 18:43 Source
-rw-r--r--  1 lars  staff    1546  1 Oct 18:43 base.make
-rw-r--r--  1 lars  staff  178016  1 Oct 18:43 config.log
-rw-r--r--  1 lars  staff     463  1 Oct 18:43 config.mak
-rwxr-xr-x  1 lars  staff   41920  1 Oct 18:42 config.status
localhost:~/GNUstep-Darwin/build/base lars$

copying just the Makefile and the GNUmakefile didn't help:

localhost:~/GNUstep-Darwin/build/base lars$ cp ../../core/base/Makefile 
Makefile
localhost:~/GNUstep-Darwin/build/base lars$ cp 
../../core/base/GNUmakefile GNUmakefile
localhost:~/GNUstep-Darwin/build/base lars$ make
GNUmakefile:46: Version: No such file or directory
make: *** No rule to make target `Version'.  Stop.



btw: GNUstep-make *can* already be build this way (which I did before 
trying on base):

mkdir build/make
cd build/make/
../../core/make/configure  --with-library-combo=gnu-gnu-gnu 
--prefix=/opt/local/GNUstep CC='/opt/local/bin/gcc'
make
sudo make install
. /opt/local/GNUstep/System/Makefiles/GNUstep.sh


regards, Lars