I like out-of-tree builds. Out-of-tree builds are nice for lots of reasons. You
can have multiple builds of the same project coexisting side-by-side – for
example a debug build for development, a release build, and an instrumented
build for code coverage runs. All the generated build artifacts are together
underneath one directory which you can easily delete without having to maintain
a make clean target, or place under .gitignore without having to maintain a
growing set of patterns for the different kinds of artifacts. I was going to
write a post about this, but came across
this one by Jussi Pakkanen which covers a lot of the
ground I would have, so I’ll just link to it here.
Instead, this post is about an issue that arises when implementing out-of-tree builds in make, and the best approach I’ve found for dealing with it.