Re: Building a snapshot

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-use-the-mailinglist-please at cygwin dot com>]

On Thu, Nov 07, 2013 at 02:30:30PM +0000, Lavrentiev, Anton (NIH/NLM/NCBI) [C] wrote:
>> I'm not sure how you translate not building in the source directory to
>> "the configure file is not supposed to be used".

Sorry.  I interpreted your confusion about the "generic to GNU"
configure script as you deciding not to run it.

>> The configure script isn't generic.  It's intended for building Cygwin.
>
>> Once again: YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BUILD IN THE SOURCE DIRECTORY.
>
>> That means you don't do this:
>
>> 1) Unpack tarball.
>
>> 2) cd to unpacked directory.
>
>> 3) ./configure
>
>> You need to create a separate build directory and run configure there.
>> This is standard GNU stuff.  Nothing Cygwin specific here.
>
>I've built a lot of GNU stuff, and most of it does use the 1), 2), 3) above.

Good for you.  If you want help from "Cygwin Gurus" you're going to have
to follow their recommendations or at least follow the instructions in
the FAQ.

>Even GCC allows doing that (but does not recommend), but I say it's
>rather an exception.  And for that, their building instructions include
>specific steps to use a separate build directory.
>
>Confusing is that the README file does not provide a clue to call
>configure from a separate build directory.  Quite the contrary, it
>shows that configure must be started from the current directory, which
>is supposedly the top of the archive (because no other location to do
>that is ever mentioned, and even if it was -- there would not be any
>configure in that build directory -- it must still be called from the
>top of the archive, i.e.  using some path, not ".").  That's about
>"generic".

The README file is (unlike the configury) a generic one for GNU
projects.  The top-level configury allows building Cygwin as part of a
toolchain which includes gcc, gdb, binutils, bfd, and newlib.  As you
note, gcc and, I believe gdb and binutils also discourage building in
the source directory but they all use the same README.

>And I later posted that I followed the "no build in the source
>directory" rule, and it failed just as ungracefully as the build I had
>been doing prior.  I asked why, and no one responded other than "it's
>how it is supposed to be".  Really?

You've apparently missed some cygwin ml messages:

http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2013-11/threads.html#00163

cgf

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