I was doing some testing of external modules last week and was having problems. At the time I chalked it up to being a corrupt build environment, but now I'm not so sure:
The problem is that installation of an external module happens only after a successful verification, and it appears that the verify target is broken when using pike -x module. It's possible that this has been broken for a long time in 7.8, as 7.8.352 also has the same problem.
Basically, in 7.6, verify called $(RUNPIKE), which was passed in by the external pike process. In 7.8 (specifically commit 385f54c91 by mast back in 2006 (!)), that's changed to $(FINAL_PIKE), which isn't, and it gets generated using the pike in the original build directory. I'm just not sure how to best fix the problem. Probably the best approach would be to modify pike -x module to also pass FINAL_PIKE with the same value.
Honestly, I don't know how this got past me for so long.
Any thoughts?
Bill