Re: [Nasm-devel] building outside the source directory

[Cyrill G. <gor...@gm...>]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 10:33:52PM -0400, Ed Beroset wrote:
> On 08/28/2018 03:24 PM, Cyrill Gorcunov wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 01:52:43PM -0400, Ed Beroset wrote:
> > > Today, for the first time in a long time, I refreshed my local copy of the
> > > NASM repo and tried to do a built outside the source directory, as is my
> > > usual practice.  It failed.
> > > 
> > > Specifically, if you clone the source into a fresh new directory "nasm" and
> > > then create and navigate into "nasm/build" I would expect the following
> > > steps to successfully do a build:
> > > 
> > > autoreconf .. -i
> > > ../configure
> > > make
> > > 
> > > However it fails because of the generated file pptok.sh
> > > 
> > > I believe I can fix this, but before I expend the effort to do so, I wanted
> > > ask some questions:
> > > 
> > > 1. can you reproduce this problem?
> > > 2. do you agree it should be fixed?
> > > 
> > > Thanks.
> > 
> > Hi Ed! Why did you enter nasm/build? Usually I personally run ./autogen.sh
> > from root source directory. Would it work for you?
> 
> Hi Cyrill,
> 
> Yes, it works from the root source directory, but only from there.  One of
> the features of autotools is that it's supposed to allow one to run
> "configure" from anywhere and build successfully.  One reason for doing that
> is that it keeps the source tree (mostly) free of build artifacts.
> 
> Another common use of this feature is to create both release and debug
> versions (in two separate locations) from the same source.  See
> https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/VPATH-Builds.html for
> example.

Ah! To be fair, never used this feature of autotools. If so then yes, it
is a bug and should be fixed.