From jmmv@google.com on June 08, 2012 12:34:29

It is very common for build systems to support placing all build products into a 'build' (aka obj or buildroot) directory. In particular, automake and autoconf support this which is what all the Kyua components (lutok, atf and kyua itself) use.

The problem of building into a buildroot is that, in general, the Kyuafiles are left behind in the source directory. This makes it impossible to go into the buildroot and run "kyua test" because, while the test programs will be within the buildroot, the Kyuafiles will not. All of atf, lutok and kyua (and possibly projects I don't know about) jump through huge hoops to cope with this: they implement a little script that populates the buildroot with copies of the source Kyuafiles. This is obviously inefficient in the sense that it hinders adoption of Kyua by consumers.

We need to make this use case easy... while maintaining simplicity. At the moment, Kyuafiles cannot reference test programs outside of their directory, and this should remain as is if possible.

The proposal is to implement a flag to "kyua test" to specify what the buildroot is, so that all paths to the test programs (NOT the Kyuafiles) get resolved relative to such buildroot. For this to work, of course, the source tree and the buildroot must have the same layout; the good thing, though, is that this is a general property of buildroots and we can rely on it.

Original issue: http://code.google.com/p/kyua/issues/detail?id=32