[Mono-dev] Running autogen.sh from outside of source tree?

[Andres G. Aragoneses]

On 22/05/14 02:20, Chris Morgan wrote:
> Hmm.
>
> I don't see any mention of NOCONFIGURE=1 in README.md.
>
> If it were possible to run autogen.sh from outside of tree it would
> make building under Yocto a little bit cleaner. Yocto is very
> particular about separating source from build from installed files so
> they can automate package generation, check for misbehaving packages
> etc.
>
> What is interesting is that a good portion of autogen.sh is ok with
> being run out of the source directory.
>
> Is it feasible to continue to improve autogen.sh to be run from
> outside of the source directory? If so, I can hack on it a bit
> tomorrow and see how I make out.

IMHO this would be a good contribution (but I can't speak for mono 
maintainers). I've even seen some opensource projects which forbid 
building within the same tree, to avoid breaking out-of-tree builds by 
mistake. Out-of-tree builds also make it much easier to clean build 
artifacts (like the files that ./autogen.sh and ./configure generates), 
so another advantage of forcing out-of-tree builds is that .gitignore 
files get much simpler (i.e. just ignore build/*).