Re: Building SVN source failures: VPATH builds; Cygwin

[Gavin Smith]

On 10 January 2017 at 18:41, Hans-Bernhard Bröker <address@hidden> wrote:
>> I will investigate more later.
>
>
> I investigated some more, too.  I found out that the problem is that you do
> have too many files check into SVN, particularly:
>
>         lib/c++defs.h
>         lib/warn-on-use.h
>         lib/arg-nonnull.h
>
> The build Makefile in MiscXS locates these in $(srcdir) via the VPATH build
> mechanism, so it believes there's no need to build them.  But the rules
> actually using them are not equipped to find them there.

Thanks for getting to the root of this. I've untracked those files and
the Makefile files as well under tp/Texinfo/MiscXS/lib. Hopefully that
will work, but it's possible that I've missed some: there are other
gnulib files elsewhere in the source which also may be incorrectly
tracked by SVN. I don't know of any easy way to know which files are
generated.

> On closer inspection, that's also the reason for the problem with help2man
> on texindex: texindex.awk is also supposed to be built in the texindex
> $(builddir), but the checked in copy in $(srcdir) misleads make.
>
> So the easy solution is: do not put generated files in SVN unless they
> really have to be.

That makes sense. I think this problem has never come up before
because it only occurs when doing an out-of-source build directly from
the SVN sources. I would guess if it was built as a distribution first
("make dist"), or not done as an out-of-source build, the problem
wouldn't occur.

I think that there were reasons for checking in texinfo.awk into SVN
version control, but I can't remember what they were.