Re: srcdir == objdir build issues [SC take note]

[DJ Delorie <dj@redhat.com>]

> there seems to be a fair number of people who like to build gcc with a 
> straight ./configure && make && make install. Unfortunately, this 
> doesn't seem to work a fair bit of the time, as is seen by the 10-20 
> bug reports we have about it in GNATS. The documentation 
> (http://gcc.gnu.org/install/configure.html) claims it _should_ work but 
> is not tested much. So my question is do we in fact support this, and 
> is it something which will receive regular testing?

Few gcc developers seem to care about building in anything other than
some unrelated directory.  I keep noting that every other source
package besides gcc is build with "./configure; make" and we'd only be
surprising the users if we don't allow it.  I do a build-in-srcdir
build every night, but often other problems prevent it from working,
so it's hard to keep on top of.

So here's an idea.  Let's ask the Steering Committee what we should
support.  Whatever we choose to not support, I'll modify configure to
detect and just plain fail, so there will be no doubts about the
situation any more.

SC - here are the options...

[ ] /some/dir/src/configure  (not matching any of the below)

[ ] ../src/configure

[ ] ../configure

[ ] ./configure

For those options the SC votes to support, we should expect anyone
submitting build-related changes to actually test those
configurations, in a worst-case scenario (most likely, a canadian
cross to a multilib target).

I've added binutils and gdb to this list, since the obvious place to
add these tests would be in the toplevel build files, so we should get
their opinion too - if they want to support things gcc doesn't, we'll
put the tests in gcc's configure.