Subject: Re: bug#11034: Binutils, GDB, GCC and Automake's 'cygnus' option

From: "Joseph S. Myers" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2012 13:17:35 +0000 (UTC)

On Sat, 31 Mar 2012, Stefano Lattarini wrote:

> Note there's nothing I'm planning to do, nor I should do, in this regard:
> the two setups described above are both already supported by the current
> automake implementation (but the last one is not encouraged, even though
> it makes perfect sense in some *rare* situations).  I was just pointing
> out that you have to choose one of these setups -- so, if you want to
> distribute info files, you must accept to have them build in the srcdir.

The approach used in GCC, for example in the libquadmath directory, is a 
--enable-generated-files-in-srcdir configure option that is used when 
building a release tarball - so normally the files go in the build 
directory, but a special configuration is used to put them in the source 
directory only when building releases.  (This does not involve the 
"cygnus" option.)  I think support for that seems more generically useful 
(and it makes sense to me for automake to look at features used in other 
packages' configure/build systems, that aren't inherently specific to 
those packages, and try to provide generic versions of them).

The Binutils/GDB release tarball building process is substantially 
different and I'm not familiar with it.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
[email-masked]