Re: Witness computation - minor breakage in the build system

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2014 00:08:59 -0500
> From: "Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> ## 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?

We need something to refresh loaddefs.el from time to time.  If you
have alternative suggestions, please describe them.