Re: deprecation of in-tree builds

[Kevin Wolf]

Am 20.08.2020 um 13:56 hat Paolo Bonzini geschrieben:
> On 20/08/20 12:54, Kevin Wolf wrote:
> >> Paolo's conversion-to-Meson patchseries is about to land, so now
> >> is the time for people who would like this "automatically create
> >> a build directory and use it" behaviour to write the necessary
> >> patches. Any volunteers ?
> >>
> >> My current plan is to land the Meson series first, because it is
> >> really painful for Paolo to try to keep rebasing it as other
> >> changes to the old build system occur. This would break
> >> in-tree builds temporarily until the "automatic creation and
> >> use of a builddir" patches go in on top of it.
> >
> > Usually, our requirement is that patch series don't break anything. And
> > if something slips through, whoever broke it is supposed to fix it, not
> > whoever is affected.
> 
> The Meson conversion was announced in October 2019 as breaking in-tree
> builds, and the deprecation request is from March 2020.  So I don't
> think this is a breakage but rather a widely-announced change.

Wasn't the decision after that discussion that we do _not_ want to
deprecate './configure; make' from the source directory?

I seem to remember that we wanted to merge a message to make a
recommendation for out-of-tree builds, but looking at configure, I can't
find even that.

So without that, and also without a mention in deprecated.rst, I don't
think having mentioned a wish to break things a while ago means that we
should just follow through with that despite the objections.

At least this isn't how it has worked for other patch series. If it is
the new standard, I can remove -drive tomorrow. I've been mentioning for
years that I don't like it and want to remove it, so people can just
deal with it.

Kevin