On Tue, 08 Feb 2011, Thomas Schwinge wrote: > On Sun, 30 Jan 2011 21:14:39 +1000, Carl Worth <cworth at cworth.org> wrote: > > On Sun, 30 Jan 2011 11:28:08 +0100, Thomas Schwinge <thomas at > > schwinge.name> wrote: > > > Still, my point holds that (unless someone is willing to spend time on > > > this, of course) we shouldn't try to replicate the Autotools, but instead > > > keep our system as simple as it currently is, and thus just have it fail > > > if configured outside of the source tree. > > > > Oh, I agree that if we don't support this then we should give the user a > > nice error message. But I think it will actually be very easy to add > > support for this. (And at this point, I think the notmuch build system > > is something that other projects could emulate if they want. I don't > > think it's too crazt). > > Is the testsuite also easy to convert to VPATH style builds? (I don't > know, but would expect some difficulties.)
It won't be easy to run the tests in different directory, but the following approach might be sufficient: When notmuch is configured and compiled in a different directory, then running `make test` there could run the tests in the original directory but the tests will invoke the notmuch binary from where it was compiled. If you send the patch for out-of-source compilation, I'll modify the test suite to work with it. -Michal