STR #2982: Cannot build outside of source tree.

STR #2982

Application:	FLTK Library
Status:	5 - New
Priority:	1 - Request for Enhancement, e.g. asking for a feature
Scope:	3 - Applies to all machines and operating systems
Subsystem:	Build Files
Summary:	Cannot build outside of source tree.
Version:	1.4-feature
Created By:	mtiernan
Assigned To:	Unassigned
Fix Version:	Unassigned
Update Notification:	Receive EMails Don't Receive EMails

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#1	mtiernan 15:41 Sep 09, 2013

Currently tested on Mac OSX.6.8 but I believe this to be system independent. If you extract the software to $SOURCE and then move to a parallel directory $BUILD you can do the configuration with ../$SOURCE/configure and it *seems* to complete sueessfully but doesn't. The same $SOURCE builds while *in* $SOURCE without any problems. It should be able to be done outside the $SOURCE tree. (This is normal behaviour in the autoconfig system.) Thanks for all your hard work!

#2	ianmacarthur 15:57 Sep 04, 2014

Is this still broken? The autoconf stuff was restructured a bit recently, and this may now work. Or maybe not... We would welcome some feedback form different build environments!

#3	mtiernan 04:54 Sep 05, 2014

I don't know, I'll download and try it again now.

#4	mtiernan 05:12 Sep 05, 2014

Ruh roh... Seems to not work as expected. Here's the results of doing a configure in another directory. It seems that the one thing *not* being "copied" over is fltk-1.3.2/Makefile which is needed after the configure to perform a build. Directory "fltk" 10 Sep 5 07:56 Current@ -> fltk-1.3.2 374 Sep 5 07:57 Darwin/ 1496 Sep 5 07:56 fltk-1.3.2/ 4260874 Sep 5 07:55 fltk-1.3.2-source.tar.gz In Darwin: 102 Sep 5 07:57 FL/ 10 Sep 5 07:56 Source@ -> ../Current 5811 Sep 5 07:57 config.h 31455 Sep 5 07:57 config.log 30367 Sep 5 07:57 config.status* 9114 Sep 5 07:57 fltk-config* 19697 Sep 5 07:57 fltk.list 3338 Sep 5 07:57 fltk.spec 4193 Sep 5 07:57 makeinclude In Darwin/FL: 1469 Sep 5 07:57 Makefile

#5	mtiernan 05:18 Sep 05, 2014

Okay, it's more than that. I just copied the file over and tried it and it fails. The configured tree expects items from the source tree to be in the current directory. :(

#6	mtiernan 05:27 Sep 05, 2014

Okay, lack of coffee is making me stupid. :( I just downloaded fltk-1.3.x-r10272 and tried it again. Nada. It fails. :( I did the autogen in the source directory then tried the build in a separate directory and it failed. I did the autogen in the build directory and it fails too. Doing the autogen and make in the source tree works.

#7	ianmacarthur 14:27 Sep 05, 2014

Oh well, we live in hope...

#8	greg.ercolano 10:28 Sep 08, 2014

Just checking: is the request to be able to run configure/make when the cwd is not the FLTK directory? I can replicate, but not sure why we should support this. We ask that folks chdir to the FLTK directory before running configure + make, as all the build instructions are sensitive to the cwd.

#9	mtiernan 15:07 Sep 08, 2014

Unless you explicitly state that you cannot support this then you should be. (You being the magic entity behind things.) It is normal and expected that you should be able to build without being in the root of the source tree. I normally build packages for a variety of platforms and I use the same source tree and build the binaries in a parallel tree. It is a normal M.O. for GNU builds.

#10	greg.ercolano 09:25 Sep 09, 2014

Sorry, I didn't know this was a feature of configure. It certainly seems to be one we don't support. I just tried this with Cairo (run configure from a separate, empty, parallel directory) and the behavior seems to be that it creates conf.h, subdirs like src, doc, test, etc. so that when running 'make' all the build related files (.o's, exe's) end up in the parallel directory. Seems fltk has not ever supported this, even 1.1.x. Currently all the docs do say to chdir to the top level fltk directory and run ./configure, but we can underline in the README files that attempting to build FLTK outside that directory does not work. Perhaps a warning from ./configure could help that as well. We should probably change this to an RFE, but I want to wait for what the other devs have to say about this one.

#11	AlbrechtS 18:23 Sep 18, 2014

CMake-generated Makefiles work in out-of-source builds, and I do this regularly. Never tried with autoconf though. I see the point, and we should probably support it, but it doesn't have priority for me. We should try to get 1.3.3 out soon, and changing the build system before that would not be wise. Lowered priority to 1 (RFE).

#12	AlbrechtS 07:45 Aug 08, 2016

Moving this STR from 1.3-feature to 1.4-feature. This is not going to be changed in branch-1.3. If anybody familiar with autotools volunteers then this might be addressed in FLTK 1.4.x though. Note: patches appreciated!