Quote:
Originally Posted by NiLuJe
It means just that, outside of the source distribution (the folder where you extracted the sources, or where your checkout from the SCM lives).
Meaning you can build and clutter with object files a folder that's miles away from the source, which is something appealing to a good number of people (especially when you work with a live source tree, or if said source tree is not hosted on a local device). Hence the need to supply the path the the toplevel source directory to cmake  . (That ability is one of the selling points of cmake, among other things).
But, it's (usually) completely optional, you can still build inside the source directory, like the Mint instructions do.
(Alternatively, there was a common trend at one point to just create a directory in the toplevel source directory, and do stuff from there, that ended up being easier to document with something like this: tar xvzf my-project-1.0.0.tar.gz && cd my-project-1.0.0 && mkdir build && cd build && cmake .. && make) |
Thank you for the reply! I will proceed with the Linux Mint option then...