Facing problems with tests

[Olly Betts]

On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 02:25:27PM +0530, Richhiey Thomas wrote:
> Yes I was using the xapian-core level configure all this while. It seemed
> to work for the API's but weirdly gave me problems for the tests.

It'll affect any files which are generated at build time by a maintainer
and then shipped in the source tarball.

> So as you suggested, I used the top level configure and collate-test worked
> as expected. Im still not completely sure how configuring the tree in
> maintainer mode helps remove these problems.

By default, maintainer mode is off and rules to rebuild things which
only a maintainer would need to rebuild are disabled.

The reason for this is that some implementations of "make" have
buggy dependency handling, particularly in cases when you're building
in a different directory to the sources (i.e. srcdir != builddir) -
also known as a VPATH build, due to it using make's VPATH feature.

Or at least that was the case ~10-15 years ago - I don't know if these
buggy makes are still around, and it could be that this is no longer
an issue at all.  We've briefly discussed just enabling maintainer mode
by default, and advising people that building outside the source tree
isn't supported for every make implementation, but it seemed like it
wasn't a critical thing to cram before 1.4.0.

OTOH, while this is a bit of a gotcha, it does highlight when people
doing development work have run the wrong configure.

Cheers,
    Olly