Off-tree builds

Off-tree builds

[Yuri D'Elia via Emacs development discussions.]

I was using a few hacks to build emacs off-tree, by configuring inside a
subfolder of the source to get a separate build tree.

This never worked quite right with bytecode and native compilation:
there are a few places where the location of the el/elc/eld files are
expected to be in the same tree. I was working this around with a few
symlinks so that I could still have the benefit of having different
builds for testing off a single source tree, but these hacks stopped
working lately.

I wonder if there's some general interest in possibly improving the
build system to support this, or nobody sees it as an advantage?

Re: Off-tree builds

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2024 10:18:41 +0200
> From:  Yuri D'Elia via "Emacs development discussions." <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> I was using a few hacks to build emacs off-tree, by configuring inside a
> subfolder of the source to get a separate build tree.
> 
> This never worked quite right with bytecode and native compilation:
> there are a few places where the location of the el/elc/eld files are
> expected to be in the same tree. I was working this around with a few
> symlinks so that I could still have the benefit of having different
> builds for testing off a single source tree, but these hacks stopped
> working lately.
> 
> I wonder if there's some general interest in possibly improving the
> build system to support this, or nobody sees it as an advantage?

Please submit detailed bug reports about every such problem.
Out-of-tree builds are supposedly fully supported, and I'm not aware
of any problems, certainly not about them "never working quite right".
The only situations I know of where an out-of-tree build could fail is
if you also have an in-tree build or at least some of its artifacts.
But in a clean source tree, an out-of-tree should "just work".