[Omake] Re: Building in subdirectories and variant builds revisited

[David Kågedal]

"Jesper Eskilson" <jesper at eskilson.se> writes:

> The simplest way to solve this in terms of variant builds is simply to
> always run the build command in the build directory; that way all the
> outpus (including the "unknown" ones) are placed in the build
> directory (where it rightly belongs), and not in the source directory
> (where it would "contaminate" other variant builds). This is how
> variant builds are implemented in the autotools world.

As Jason said, not all programs behave that way.  It only works for
programs that put their output in the current directory, or where you
can instruct them where to put it.

> IMO, the impreciseness of the build rules are really orthogonal to the
> issue of variant builds.

Mostly orthogonal, at least.  For cases where you don't specify the
input files, the program might start looking in the current directory
for inputs instead of in the real source directory.  It sounded like
ocamldep was broken in this way, but I have never used it.

-- 
David Kågedal