build farm: suggested enhancement

David Lee t.d.lee at durham.ac.uk
Fri May 16 08:58:00 GMT 2003


I recently reported two problems to 3.0alpha24:
 1.  Bugzilla 83 (3.0a24-specific) which then exposed the more general:
 2.  samba-technical thread: "Subject: 3.0alpha24: make bug (or more...)"


I presume that these problems are not detected by the build farm, but I
suspect it would be relatively easy to correct this (although I'll confess
to knowing nothing about the details of the build farm mechanics).

Most build-from-source Samba sites, including the farm components probably
simply build Samba *within* the directory "source".  (So the first command
will be "./configure ...", directly within "source".)

But in principle any autoconf application ought to be capable of building
in a directory other than "source".  This is especially helpful to sites
with multiple computer architectures to support.

In such cases then "source" ought to be, in effect, read-only.  That is,
"configure", "make" etc., should do all their writing into the build
directory, and none at all into the "source" subtree.

The make bug I reported exposed an instance of some files being written
relative to $(srcdir) rather than to $(builddir).  (The mislocation of
these output ".h" files is not subsequently detected at compile time,
because the list of "-I<...>" includes both locations.)


I think my suggested fix is (in principle at least!) simple.

The build farm could include some instances of "$(srcdir) != $(builddir)".
This would immediately detect things such as bugzilla 83.

Also it could do some sort of before-and-after check on "source",
recursively, to ensure that no changes have been made.

Thoughts?


-- 

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