I learned this two days ago, so I'm still embarrassed about it because I should have known about it 10+ years ago. In an autotools based project (one with a co

I learned this two days ago, so I'm still embarrassed about it because I should have known about it 10+ years ago. In an autotools based project (one with a configure script) you can build it such that intermediate files aren't created in its source dirs. For example: tar xjvf gcc-4.6.0.tar.bz2 mkdir gcc-obj cd gcc-obj ../gcc-4.6.0/configure make