Re: redundant DOC files

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Leo <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2007 06:34:24 +0000
> 
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.1M Jan 10 10:42 DOC-22.0.92.1
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.1M Jan 10 12:09 DOC-22.0.92.2
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.1M Jan 14 04:52 DOC-22.0.92.3
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.1M Jan 14 04:57 DOC-22.0.92.4
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.1M Jan 18 21:46 DOC-22.0.92.5
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.1M Jan 18 21:48 DOC-22.0.92.6
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.1M Jan 20 06:08 DOC-22.0.92.7
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2.1M Jan 20 06:11 DOC-22.0.92.8
> 
> Can someone tell me what is the use of this DOC-* file?

These are the doc strings for all the functions and variables that are
preloaded into Emacs.

> 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.

> Because each time after installing
> Emacs, the first thing I do is go to the data-directory and delete
> all of them except the one correspond to current Emacs version.

If you don't need the previous emacs-* binaries, it's okay to remove
them and the corresponding DOC-* files.

> The point is if I have 50 builds then the DOC-* will take up more than
> 100M disk space.

Whoever cares about 100MB of disk space these days? ;-)

And 50 builds give you 600MB worth of Emacs binaries (which you never
mentioned in your message), so adding 100MB more to that is hardly a
major issue, is it?