Re: [PATCH] Project out of sources compilation

[Konstantin Kharlamov <Hi-Angel@yandex.ru>]

On Thu, 2024-04-04 at 17:41 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2024 16:27:34 +0200
> > From: Ergus <spacibba@aol.com>
> > Cc: Hi-Angel@yandex.ru, rms@gnu.org, dmitry@gutov.dev,
> > emacs-devel@gnu.org
> > 
> > > The reason is that Emacs's support for "running uininstalled"
> > > assumes
> > > the Lisp files are in the source tree.  IOW, running uninstalled
> > > from
> > > a build directory outside of the source tree does not take the
> > > *.elc
> > > files from that build directory, as I think you can verify if you
> > > look
> > > at the value of load-path.
> > 
> > Exactly, so this is not OOSC and does not behave as expected in
> > OOSC.
> 
> No, it isn't.  Not many programs at all support running uninstalled.
> Emacs does, but only if you build inside the source.  This is
> unrelated to the possibility of out-of-source build, where you are
> supposed to say "make install" after you build.

Indeed running uninstalled is kind of orthogonal to OOSC and may or may
not be supported by a program.  I think this discussion might be
confusing two orthogonal things: α) `.elc` files being put in-tree, and
β) Emacs requiring for them to be put in-tree to run "uninstalled".

For β: I'm sure it's possible to modify Emacs to load `.elc` from the
build dir rather than from the tree.

For α: the lone fact that build artifacts are being put in-tree means
OOSC is not working as expected.

I see what you mean by saying that `configure` and similar files can't
be put into the build dir because that's how autotools work.  Okay. 
But I think this whole discussion about the terminology is becoming not
very useful.  Can we please agree that generating .elc files in the
build dir rather than in tree allows to avoid a number of problems? 
Please note that this has nothing to do with `.elc` files being put in
tarballs, because for that to work you could just build "in-tree" as
usual.  Putting `.elc` files into build dir (which may be in-tree or
out) and allowing Emacs to take those into account is just
simplification in how things work.