build directory outside of source tree

[Paweł Hajdan, Jr.]

I'm trying to build "all" outside of the source tree. FWIW, this command completes very quickly because it immediately errors out. The entire repro is short and quick:

$ gn gen ~/gnout/Release

Done. Wrote 5405 targets from 933 files in 1009ms

$ ninja -C ~/gnout/Release all

ninja: Entering directory `/usr/local/google/home/phajdan/gnout/Release'

ninja: error: '../../chromium/src/chromium/src/remoting/webapp/build-html.py', needed by 'obj/remoting/webapp/unittest_html.inputdeps.stamp', missing and no known rule to make it

Is this expected?

I'm trying to understand this error and ways to fix it.

See https://build.chromium.org/p/chromium.fyi/builders/Linux%20Kitchen%20%28kitchen_run%29 for more errors like that.

Any advice would be welcome. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Paweł

[Brett Wilson]

Yeah, we've never really tested that so I imagine there are a number of bugs. Some bugs may be in the GN binary itself. There is another class of bugs where people make assumptions about the build directory being two levels inside of the root ouf the source dir (i.e. "out/foo") when coding actions.

This is something we would like to support in general so it's great to fix any errors you find.

Brett

[Paweł Hajdan, Jr.]

Sounds good!

I uploaded https://codereview.chromium.org/1947923002 and so far didn't encounter any other errors.

Paweł