I understand that as a stop-gap, McPAT will need to use a separate build process from gem5. However, until the gem5 community really commits to tightening integration with McPAT, it feels unsettling to have to clutter the gem5 .hgignore file for its inclusion (as an extra). Maybe I'm just advocating for adding .hgignore comments that reflect this is a stop-gap solution, but I also describe a couple alternative routes below, which would feel much better to me.


Depending on the expected longer-term direction with McPAT, I'd prefer something other than modifying the .hgignore. A couple other options:

(1) If the plan is to have McPAT build separately from gem5 (i.e. outside of scons), then maybe we could set the default McPAT configuration build-prefix to be under the gem5/build/ directory, which is already included in the .hgignore

(2) If the plan is to build McPAT as an optional extra or tightly integrated with gem5 simulation (i.e. completely within scons), then we could (will) add the appropriate SConscript files to gem5/ext/mcpat/ to do the build within gem5/build/