Re: redundant DOC files

[Stefan Monnier]

>> And why we have to have that many DOC-* files?

> Each one goes with the corresponding emacs-22.0.92.N binary which you
> have in your src directory.  The theory behind this is that you might
> wish to try an older build, e.g. to see whether some problem you find
> in the latest build happens in earlier builds a swell.  When you do
> that, you will need the corresponding DOC-* file, because otherwise
> documentation commands could show you garbage.

Actually, you won't see garbage.  There's a low probability that you'll see
the wrong docstring because the mismatch was not detected, and a high
probability that the mismatch will be detected and then the docstring
pointers are recomputed and things work correctly from then on.

The low probability is of the order "1/number of bytes in a docstring", so
less than 1%.


        Stefan