[ghemical-devel] out of tree building

[Michael Banck]

Hi,

some time ago I noticed that openbabel-2.0 does not build correctly when
you build out-of-tree.  To illustrate:

 $ cd openbabel-2.0.0
 $ mkdir build
 $ ../configure
 $ make

This is because we ship [openbabel]/src/babelconfig.h in the tarball
which is actually a system-specific generated file.  If somebody builds
out of tree, this file is not overwritten during/after configure, and as
[openbabel]/src is in the standard -I include path (and before
[build-dir]/src I believe), the shipped babelconfig.h gets included
rather than the generated one.  If the user chooses some options
incompatible with the shipped one (I think it was gzip support in my
case) the build fails in strange ways.

I propose we just stop babelconfig.h from being shipped in the tarball
(whether it should get installed by make install is another matter I
believe we discussed before), is there any reason not to?


cheers,

Michael