Make building out-of-place the default

[evertrol]

The default for building with Python 2 is in-place. While this is easiest, in particular for building single codes, the default should probably be an out-of-place build.

[ipelupessy]

I think you want same behaviour for python2 and 3, and since python 3 does not support in-place build due to 2to3, this is reasonable, but this will probably invite discussion! (which is good)

[evertrol]

On the other hand, if a Py2/3 compatible code base could happen relatively soon (at least for relevant files), this issue may become largely moot.

[egpbos]

Even with a 2/3 compatible code base, out-of-place builds make management of the repo easier (no long gitignore list, just ignore build/; easy restarting from scratch by deleting the build directory; easy multiple builds with different configurations), so I would still vote for it.

[rieder]

So would I. virtualenv makes it easy to install in a separate directory if this is desired anyway.

[ipelupessy]

closing this; out of place is the default if using setup.py, other issues are fixed with combinations of pip install [-e] etc