Well, PROVIDED that your Make program supports VPATH, it's very
simple. If it doesn't, you simply can't (and you could use a forest
of symbolic links instead -- see the mkreal script from the
Demo/scripts directory).
What I do is simply this (I build in a subdirectory of /usr/tmp for
sentimental reasons :-):
cd /usr/tmp
mkdir python
cd python
~guido/src/python/configure
.
. (several minutes pass)
.
make
This of course presumes that ~guido/src/python is the top directory of
the Python source tree. If you want to use readline it's a bit more
tricky, since the configure script doesn't patch its Makefile.
One thing to remember about VPATH is that generally Make does not do
variable substitution on VPATH; this this is alright:
srcdir = /ufs/guido/src/python/Python
VPATH = /ufs/guido/src/python/Python
and this fails:
srcdir = /ufs/guido/src/python/Python
VPATH = $(srcdir)
--Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl>
URL: <http://www.cwi.nl/cwi/people/Guido.van.Rossum.html>