[ovirt-devel] 'make distcheck' issues in VDSM project (regarding BZ#1297808)

Hi, I've been doing some work around making 'make distcheck' and VPATH builds successful for VDSM. Some patches have already been merged, but there is one that I've abandoned because it touches a bigger issue. When doing a VPATH build, some python sources are build-time generated from '.py.in' files (at this moment: 'lib/vdsm/common/constants.py.in', 'lib/vdsm/common/config.py.in', 'lib/vdsm/common/dsaversion.py.in', '/lib/sos/vdsm.py.in'). Suppose we do a VPATH build with: cd ${SRCROOT} && \     ./autogen.sh && \     make distclean && \     mkdir -p /tmp/ovirt-build && \     cd /tmp/ovirt-build && \     ${SRCROOT}/configure && \     make The build-generated '.py' files will land in '/tmp/ovirt-build/lib/...'. As a result, even though the build-generated python modules and the source ones refer to each other, they can't see each other. After some trial and error here are my observations:   - we can't generate resulting '.py' files in $(srcdir) - 'make distcheck' purposely sets $(srcdir) to be read-only   - we can't just simply add $(builddir) to PYTHONPATH - there are no '__init__.py' files in $(builddir), so i.e. 'import vdsm.common.config' will fail   - we can't create dummy '__init__.py' files in $(builddir), because that would break in-tree-builds (we would have to clean regular, git-maintained files) In conclusion, I think we would need to implement a custom python module loader to make VPATH/distcheck successful. It would need to be parametrized with $(builddir)'s path, and would try to resolve unsuccessful imports by finding build-time generated files inside. However, after looking at other oVirt projects (i.e. 'ioprocess', 'ovirt-iso-uploader', 'ovirt-node-ng', 'ovirt-register'), I can see that most of them fail 'make distcheck'. They have even more severe 'makefile'-issues than importing build-time generated python files. So the question is - do we really need 'make distcheck' for VDSM to suceed? Marcin