Re: Canonical location for emacs-version string in source tree?

[Ken Raeburn]

On May 23, 2010, at 10:16, Drew Adams wrote:
> I have multiple Emacs versions installed (multiple binaries), and I expect 
> each
> of them to faithfully have its own set of doc strings, that is, specific to 
> the
> particular build.  Trying to deal with doc bugs and improvements would be
> problematic without this distinction.

The release version number is coded into the directory name, so it's only 
different builds of the same release that would have the DOC files winding up 
in the same directory.  And the build process jumps through some hoops to 
ensure that the file is consistently built from the same input files, 
regardless of build options.  And as Stefan has pointed out, there's code to 
detect when the offsets are wrong (e.g., if functions got added, removed, or 
reordered).  So if we didn't use filenames varying for each build, the doc 
strings would actually have to change between builds for the result to be 
wrong, which I think pretty much confines it to developers' builds.  And even 
then, it probably doesn't matter much unless the semantics of a function 
change; having an old binary see typographical or grammatical fixes from a 
newer build may be less objectionable.

(The Windows build appears to be different on the naming score, with DOC and 
DOC-X instead of DOC-nn.nn.nn; I don't know about the other stuff.)

Still, I'm inclined to think it's better that each version uses the doc strings 
it was built and installed with.

Possibly more important is that multiple versions installed under the same 
prefix with the same release version number will share lisp files, even if the 
lisp files have changed.  So I'm a bit skeptical of the utility of keeping the 
binaries separate from one install to the next.

> That concern might be irrelevant to having "a single DOC file" in the source
> tree - dunno.  I'm not concerned about the build process, but I would not want
> multiple binaries of Emacs on my machine to show the same set of doc strings.

Ken