I've been playing around with external module building under Pike 7.7, and I think that most of the difficulty involves propagated_variables. There's a propagated_variables file that gets installed in include/pike, but it seems that the macro that actually reads this file only looks for it in the current directory. I think I understand that rationale when compiling within the source tree, but think there needs to be a behavior that checks for the file in the installed headers directory too. The question for those more knowledgeable in this magic is: does it seem reasonable to check in the installed headers directory first (most likely $BUILD_BASE, I think), then in the current directory for all situations or would that have an undesirable effect when compiling within the Pike source tree?