Re: Bootstrap deleted DOC-nnn file

[chad <yandros@MIT.EDU>]

On 10 May 2013, at 15:08, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

>    But "make bootstrap" also deletes all the emacs-nnn executables,
>    doesn't it?  If so, there's no point in keeping their DOC files.
> 
> Yes there is.  I had a job running, and it could not get its DOC file.
> 
> However, it is a bad thing to delete the old executables too.
> It is sometimes useful to compare behavior of the new version
> with the old version.  There is no need to delete them,
> so let the user decide.

I used to run into this minor issue frequently when building
development versions of emacs for MIT's campus computer system.
Over time, the build trees would collect a bunch of DOC files, but
it was pretty easy to clean up, and since we were intentionally on
the bleeding edge, keeping multiple versions was occasionally useful.

There is a big problem with that approach, though: only the executable
and the DOC files are versioned. The elisp libraries would immediately
out of sync, and since most of the changes are to lisp files, the
old binary+DOC was of very limited usefulness.

As an aside, these days I follow emacs dev on a macosx system (using
the ns port; the mac port doesn't have this functionality) that
uses a relocatable install, so the entirety of emacs lives inside
a single emacs-only directory tree (Emacs.app). This makes multiple
versions very easy to manage, and I keep at least two independent
emacsen around at all times. It's saved me more than once.

I hope that helps,
~Chad