From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Jeffrey A Law <law@cygnus.com>
To: Craig Burley <burley@gnu.org>
Cc: pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at, sichen@studbox.uni-stuttgart.de, egcs@cygnus.com
Subject: Re: egcs-1.0.2 installation 
Date: Sat, 18 Apr 1998 01:43:00 -0000
Message-id: <12592.892876203@hurl.cygnus.com>
References: <199804161538.LAA23802@melange.gnu.org>
X-SW-Source: 1998-04/msg00724.html

  In message < 199804161538.LAA23802@melange.gnu.org >you write:
  > >To the egcs guys: INSTALL/CONFIGURE does not state this clearly, should I
  > >submit a patch? 
  > 
  > I'd prefer that configure detect and reject this.  A simple-minded
  > approach might be something along the lines of:
Funny, I recommended we do that internally at Cygnus since new folks
always make the mistake of building in the source tree once.

The idea was to catch it in the toplevel configure and issue a warning
or error.

While I *personally* think it's a great idea, there are some drawbacks:

  * For years folks have been striving to make the gnu tools easier
  to build/install and have been preacing the "tar xzf blah.tar.gz; cd blah;
  configure; make" as all they need to do for most installations.

  Changing configure to only allow building in a separate dir breaks
  that model.

  * What to do about systems that don't have gnu-make.  Yes, we can
  suggest people use it over and over, but some folks always ignore
  that suggestion.   Most of the time vendor makes can't handle building
  outside of the source tree.

jeff