Re: Enabling builddir != srcdir by default in jhbuild

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi;

On 28 February 2016 at 15:54, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org> wrote:
> On Sun, 2016-02-28 at 14:33 +0000, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> > My proposal is to enable this behaviour in the default jhbuildrc, so
> > that all GNOME projects automatically build in a separate root. This
> > change should have no, or minimal impact on the subset of the
> > moduleset that is covered by Continuous; it may require fixing the
> > build of various modules in the gnome-apps or gnome-world modulesets.
> > The major upsides would be that:
>
> +1, I've been wanting to do this for a while.
>
> There is a problem though, in that Automake's vala support is pretty
> broken for git builds where builddir != srcdir, hence all (well,
> virtually all) vala projects only support builddir != srcdir when
> building from tarballs. Sometimes the only way to fix builddir !=
> srcdir issues is to introduce broken nonsensical changes to the
> Automake file [1]. So when you make this change, you should do a clean
> build of all the modules and add exceptions for all the modules that
> break, with the expectation that most Vala modules will be broken. (You
> were probably planning to do this anyway, so just pointing it out.)
>
> If anyone is interested in fixing this in Automake, that would be
> ideal.
>
> [1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=760679

Given the amount of resources currently devoted to Vala, and
especially the interaction between the compiler and autotools, I'd say
that all Vala-based projects should use the
'supports-non-srcdir-builds="no"' attribute in their module definition
inside jhbuild modulesets.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
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