Re: [PATCH] autotools.bbclass: Add functionality to force a distclean when reconfiguring

[Colin Walters <walters@verbum.org>]

On Sat, 2012-09-08 at 08:30 -0500, Mark Hatle wrote:

> In principal I agree completely, however in practice at least 20-30% of the 
> packages I try won't deal w/ the B/S separation properly.

So what I did in my most recent build system[1] is:

1) Default to srcdir != builddir
2) Tag modules which don't support that

See: http://people.gnome.org/~walters/docs/build-api.txt

If a module doesn't support srcdir != builddir, I simply copy the source
tree to the builddir.  This is can be a confusing trap from a developer
perspective; I've caught myself editing the copied source files, and
then had them blown away during a build. 

But in general we should pressure upstreams to support srcdir !=
builddir, because the benefits are great and the drawbacks small.

It'd be awesome if you guys considered having the bitbake autotools
class implement the same semantics.

[1]
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-ostree/tree/src/ostbuild/pyostbuild/builtin_compile_one.py#n132