Why docs/term.h ???

[Hans-Bernhard B. <br...@ph...>]

Hi, folks,

to my considerable surprise, I've just discovered that, as of December
2002, the build of online help no longer masks out terminal drivers. Our
Debian package maintainer just forwarded this to us, as a bug report.

This used to be done by having docs/termdoc.c #include docs/allterm.h for
printable doc files, or src/term.h for online versions that should match
what is actually present in term.h.

But Lars introduced a change (revision 1.44 of docs/Makefile.in) that
relies on a separate file, docs/term.h, built by concatenating and
preprocessing the config.h file and a selection of terminal driver
sources listed in docs/Makefile.in, $(CORETERM):

term.h: $(CORETERM)
        @echo "Building term.h"
        @cat ../config.h $(CORETERM) > term.c
        $(CPP) $(DEFS) $(DEFAULT_INCLUDES) $(INCLUDES) $(CPPFLAGS)  \
            -DTERM_DRIVER_H -DTERM_HELP term.c | \
          sed '/^ *$$/d;/^#/d' >$@
        @rm -f term.c

The problem with this construction is that the logical connection between
config.h and the decision which terminal drivers to include exists *only*
inside src/term.h, so this method completely fails to screen out the
unwanted drivers.

So: why can't the doc2*.o files just refer to ../src/term.h?  What is
docs/term.h needed for?  I guess this question goes mainly to Lars, but
any insight from others would be valuable.

-- 
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (br...@ph...)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.