Allow a build directory to be specified to Configure.pl

[dukeleto]

To facilitate cross-compiling environments, it would be nice if we had something like

perl Configure.pl --builddir=/foo/build

See  http://lists.parrot.org/pipermail/parrot-dev/2010-March/003992.html for more details.

This feature would greatly help in porting Parrot to Embedded Linux distros as well as RTEMS.

[jkeenan]

Replying to dukeleto:

To facilitate cross-compiling environments, it would be nice if we had something like perl Configure.pl --builddir=/foo/build

At coke's suggestion, I created a branch for this purpose:  https://svn.parrot.org/parrot/branches/tt1516_builddir_option/

I committed one patch to this branch (r45050) -- a patch which, I should caution, DOES NOT WORK. (The build fails at miniparrot because it can't locate -lparrot.) So it illustrates that we need to figure out how to get all the linking paths to work right.

People working on this ticket should also perldoc Configure.pl and read up on file-based configuration.

Thank you very much.

kid51

[gerd]

really only a little first step

[gerd]

If I understand this, then the "builddir" option is to be able to specify a builddir that is different from the source directory and all generated files during the "make" will be written in that directory.

So may be: sourcedir != builddir != installdir

For building gcc you have to change the current directory to the build directory before executing make.

I add a patch for that I think would be the first step after enable the builddir option. It looks to be a terrible work to get the builddir option working.

[doughera]

Replying to gerd:

For building gcc you have to change the current directory to the build directory before executing make.

This is what perl 5 does also. In fact for perl 5, we actually just make a symlink tree so that most of the build process didn't have to be altered. Thus you run something like

    mkdir build
    cd build
    sh ../perl-5.12.0/Configure -Dmksymlinks [... other options]
    make

[jkeenan]

dukeleto,

Could you comment on what steps we need to take next on this ticket?

Thank you very much.

kid51