Re: Witness computation - minor breakage in the build system

["Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com>]

Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>:
> Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> >I think the fixed Makefile code would
> >remain unpleasantly fragile, and the witness-path computation is
> >best moved to the configure stage.
> 
> I've never understood the need for having the
> last-repository-change date affect the build, and
> would favor removing all the vcswitness stuff.

Here's what the src/Makefile.in says about it:

## VCSWITNESS points to the file that holds info about the current checkout.
## We use it as a heuristic to decide when to rebuild loaddefs.el.
## If empty it is ignored; the parent makefile can set it to some other value.

It would make my life simpler if this mechanism were removed; that's one of only
two dependencies of Cazaar in the entire build (the other one is in 
lisp/version.el).  And the fact that the bug went undetected suggests that
the mechanism wasn't very useful.

Anyone want to argue for keeping this?  Support removing it?  Suggest
something else?
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>