Bug 16619 – [GTK] Autotools shoud default to WebKitBuild as the build directory

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: WONTFIX
• Component: WebKitGTK

[Jan Alonzo]

Autotools should default to WebKitBuild as the default build directory. This should avoid littering the source dir with object files and other build artifacts.

[Sylvain Pasche]

Usually the build directory is the current directory you are in when invoking configure or autogen.sh.

I looked at a few autogen.sh scripts, and they always use the current working directory as the objdir.

However, there could be a higher level script which would create the WebKitBuild directory, and launch autogen.sh or configure from there. But I'm not sure this brings a lot of added value.

We could rather correct the build documentation to use this WebKitBuild directory (once bug 16736 is fixed):

Instead of 

./autogen.sh --prefix=/path/to/install/directory 
make

There would be:

mkdir WebKitBuild
cd WebKitBuild
../autogen.sh --prefix=/path/to/install/directory 
make

[Alp Toker]

I would say this is a characteristic of autotools. The correct way to avoid
littering the source tree, as you pointed out yourself, is to build outside of
the source tree.

Please re-open the bug if you disagree.