Re: Enabling builddir != srcdir by default in jhbuild

[Yanko Kaneti <yaneti declera com>]

On Sun, 2016-02-28 at 09:54 -0600, Michael Catanzaro 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.

I was interested sometime ago and produced something minimal that works
for me but dropped the ball due to not being able to conjure the
testcases for the fix...

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake-patches/2014-12/msg00000.html


- Yanko


> [1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=760679