While trying to build the official Debian packages for libguestfs 1.22, I noticed that instead of working around ExtUtils::MakeMaker's limitations, I had made quite a mess of building the Perl bindings. I have tried from different sides to fix things, but could not get it quite right: - EU::MM expects Makefile.PL to be in the same directory as the generated Makefile (We work around that using sed.) - In principle, there seem to be two ways to do things: 1. Call make -f builddir/Makefile-pl from srcdir (that's what we do now), override INST_*. Problems with this: - XS is still built in srcdir. - there is actually code in ExtUtils::Install which is used from the generated Makefile-pl that bases its decisions where to install *.pm files on whether there are any files within ./blib/arch/ (hard-coded)! I have found no way to override this. 2. Call make -f Makefile-pl from builddir. I tried that and thought that I would be able to patch absolute paths for source files (*.xs, lib/*) and generated files (*.c, *.xs, blib/*) into the generated Makefile-pl. Much of a perfectly good weekend went to waste over that attempt. I realized that I was actively working against ExtUtils::MakeMaker's design. Separating source and build trees has never been a concern. Even if I got it right once, I'd expect things to break in interesting ways in the future. solution, either. I give up and propose that we go back to the hackish, yet simple previous solution and adopt that for libguestfs as well: -[ $(srcdir) != $(builddir) ] && cp -rsu $(abs_srcdir)/. $(builddir)/. I agree that this is ugly, but works and it won't hurt when building libguestfs from within the source directory. Cheers, -Hilko