Re: [PATCH v4 for-5.0] configure: warn if not using a separate build directory

[Peter Maydell]

On Fri, 3 Apr 2020 at 23:35, Aleksandar Markovic
<address@hidden> wrote:
> But, Eric, while, to some extent I understand your motivation and the idea, 
> there are still features working in in-tree builds only (some coccinele 
> scenarios, and some gcov-related scenarios - and perhaps others that nobody 
> seems to care to try to find out at all), and not in out-of tree builds. And, 
> now, if I understand well your proposal, and supposing that I use gcov 
> in-tree build (since I have to), this will stop me from doing out-of-tree 
> builds in this QEMU directory, since my in-tree gcov build will be destroyed.

To repeat from the last thread: we are *not going* to remove in-tree
builds before we fix whatever we need to to allow people to
use out-of-tree for whatever they are currently doing with in-tree
builds. The reason for putting in deprecation warnings etc now
is timescales: releases are every four months or so, so if we
want to warn users about something we need to put in that warning
well in advance. Bug fixes on the other hand can go into the tree
very quickly, so we can without any problems have a timeline that
goes deprecation-notice --- fix bugs with out-of-tree builds -- remove
or convert in-tree builds to automatically out-of-tree.

Plus the only way we find out about problems we're going to need
to fix is if we tell people "in-tree is going away" and they then tell
us "er, XYZ doesn't seem to work out-of-tree".

The reason people are currently focusing on the warning bit
is that we have about one week to do that if we want to get
it into this release. After that we have months to investigate
and fix the problems with out-of-tree builds.

Can you provide repro instructions for your gcov issue?

What is the "coccinelle scenario" you mention?

thanks
-- PMM