how to build Xapian project on windows?

[Olly Betts]

On Fri, Sep 01, 2017 at 05:55:55AM +0000, Eric Lindblad wrote:
> 
> > Those nmake files have been without a maintainer since about 2011, so
> > it's not a big surprise that they don't work without a few tweaks at
> > this point.
> 
> > Nobody seems interested in keeping the nmake files up to date, so it's
> > probably time we just removed them.
> 
> I think formerly it was listed on the Xapian website which was the last
> version of xapian-core known to compile with nmake.exe; I don't recall
> presently if that was listed as 1.2.8 or 1.2.12.

I don't think that was ever stated - I don't see it in the git history of
the website either.  The last update to them from Charlie was for 1.2.4.

It's close to irrelevant when they last worked at this point - the current
stable release series is 1.4.x, and they definitely won't work with that.

> If there are no objections maybe I'll place the nmake files in a repository

Unless you're going to actually update the files to work with current
releases, it seems pointless to copy them to a new repo.  What they
need is a *maintainer*, not hosting.

Removing files from git won't remove their history, so they'll still be
publically accessible from the git repo if anyone wants to fish them out
in the future.  You just won't get them when you checkout by default
(which means people won't expect them to work with the code they're
currently sitting alongside).

If they're going to be kept current, then they can continue to live where
they are currently (though if someone would rather maintain them elsewhere,
that's fine too).

Cheers,
    Olly