Bug 488410

SUMMARY
Hello,

I am having several problems trying to define custom build tools. It's not entirely clear when/how the different settings are being stored, sometimes there aren't even any changes at all. 

In particular, I was trying to move all the temporary files derived from a compilation into a subdirectory to avoid cluttering the root folder. This has proven to be a complication with the BibTex tool, which I couldn't make it work for this particular case. Here are some of the problems I have found.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE / OBSERVED RESULT
* One of the bugs is that whenever a setting has been defined (e.g., those in Advanced -> "Source extension", "Target extension", "Target file", "Relative dir"), they cannot be emptied once again. If one erases the option, presses "OK", and goes back to the Configuration menu, the pre-erasure settings appear once again. This proves to be a problem when creating a configuration for an already-existing tool: as the configuration is cloned from the currently active one, some fields already have some pre-stored values and thus cannot be cleared.
* Adding a "Relative dir" does not work, kile still tries to search for the .aux file in the root folder. I have to manually add the folder as an option to the command. 
* When a "Source extension" is defined it overrides the other options. i.e., if I try to set "aux" as the source, then the relative directory I added in the previous step stops working.
* Changing a Tool's Configuration Advanced->Type (e.g., to execute from Konsole, as I wanted to debug what wasn't working) didn't work neither when modifying an existing configuration (or modifying one just created from an existing tool, which copies the options from the currently active configuration). 
* The tool is not added to the build menu until one access the "Menu" tab. I understand if this is a choice, i.e., do not create the tool until the user (inadvertently) requests for it, but then I don't understand why it wouldn't be possible to remove the tool from the menu. Furthermore, changing the tool's icon does not take effect until restarting the application.
 
EXPECTED RESULT

In the end, the only way I could achieve my intended use was to create a new duplicated tool of a "custom" class (so as to not grab any bibtex defaults), making sure I did not accidently set any of the conflicting fields, i.e., immediately creating a configuration without "source extension", that opens in Konsole, and has the relative dir set as an option of the tool. But this also means that in order to have the full pipeline (i.e., compiling a main.tex, then compiling the bibliography, recompiling the main.tex and then having the preview of the PDF) working with an output dir, I would need to create duplicated tools for each step (ViewPDF, e.g.: "relative dir" does not work, it already has a "source extension", and there's no way to manually set a relative dir).

I think the current functionality doesn't reflect what one would expect from the current interface. I didn't notice if this happened with other tools (i.e., I didn't notice this problem happening with pdflatex because I used the `-output-dir=folder` option for the command, so I didn't notice that "Relative dir" wouldn't be actually working, and there was no "Source extension" overriding the other options neither). 

I know this report is a bit all over the place and I am happy to provide any additional details, but I am not sure how to debug this further, i.e. I wasn't able to find any verbose mode nor logs for Kile, and I couldn't access the documentation linked on the project's page (https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/kile/kile/index.html), therefore being more restricted on my description was difficult (i.e., I can only report "end-user" stuff directly).


SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Linux/KDE Plasma: Kubuntu 23.10
(available in About System)
KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.8
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.110.0
Qt Version: 5.15.10