Change to target directory before running tool

[ghost]

Some tools have limited ability to use sources from different directories or to change output file name. For example, Latex has problems in both aspects. Should devise a simple way to specify that a tool is "bad" and workaround this problems by going to target directory before running the tool.

[grafik@…]

I just ran into a different variation of this problem. GAS, the GNU assembler, has some internal argument length limits. The long paths that get passed in my case for output object file, using MinGW, cause GAS to complain it can't create the file. Since this is internal to the GCC toolchain, the only solution, outside of fixing GAS, is to shorted the paths somehow. Changing to the target dir is one way to shorten that path. Another is to generate the output to a temp dir and copy/move to the real target. And yet another is to shorten all variant subdirs, for example by hashing the target path, and using the hash as a dir name instead of the deep target path.

[grafik@…]

And I found another example of this problem. When doing profile builds with GCC the gmon.out file generated with the profile info is put into the current directory instead of where the program binary is. This presents the problem that running multiple profiled programs overwrites the gmon.out file. This is important when running automated tests as the profiling would not happen interactively.