Re: deprecation of in-tree builds

[Kevin Wolf]

Am 31.03.2020 um 09:48 hat Paolo Bonzini geschrieben:
> On 30/03/20 16:37, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> > If manually dealing with separate build directories is inconvenient
> > today, it will still be inconvenient with Meson, so this would mean
> > introducing the automatic directly creation together with the other
> > changes to enable Meson. Which is fine by me, as long as it is really
> > done when the external directory becomes mandatory, so that people won't
> > have to switch back and forth between directories.
> 
> Serious question: why is automatic directly creation more convenient for
> developers?  Even if "./configure" generates a "build" directory for
> you, you would still have to invoke the QEMU binary as
> "build/x86_64-softmmu/qemu-system-x86_64".  That is less convenient than
> doing "mkdir build" in the first place.

Mainly because it allows me to start everything (most importantly: my
editor, git and make) from the same directory.

I guess the automatic directory creation is the less important part
compared to a Makefile in the source tree that calls the Makefile in the
build directory, because creation the directory is a one-time thing, but
I call make all the time.

Creating it automatically is nice especially for those who build QEMU
for the first time and expect that the ./configure; make; make install
sequence they are used to just works.

Prefixing build/ when using the binaries is a change, too, but I guess
tab completion means that it's not much worse than prefixing ./

> I can see why it's more convenient for packaging, as they just invoke
> "make" and "make install", but as far as developers are concerned it
> seems to add complexity for little or no gain.

I often use the same terminal for building/testing and git, or sometimes
even a second editor for source code.

Kevin