Subject: Re: A couple of clarifications
From: Kevin Vajk (kvajk@ricochet.net)
Date: Sun Feb 13 2000 - 11:42:57 CST
On Sat, 12 Feb 2000 abnay@altavista.net wrote:
> 1. I notice Rcs_Id is ifndef'ed as a global static
> variable in several files like
> abi/src/other/spell/good.c and
> abi/src/other/spell/lookup.c
> and is not used.
...
> Wat is the purpose of this
> variable?
It's for RCS. When you check in a file using RCS, it looks
for strings containing those magic characters, and modifies
them to contain information about the version number, checkin
date, etcetera. Having this string in the code rather than
in the comments means that it turns up in the binary and
can be accessed using a command like "what" (or just strings).
So, if you're using RCS, this string gives you a way to
determine what source code a given binary was built from.
I believe that CVS honors this just like RCS would.
> What is the define variable lint
> supposed to do?
lint is a program which checks C code for problems. (We
don't tend to use lint, since gcc is good at that already.)
It's like "gcc -Wall", only it doesn't actually build any
binaries. The lint variable basically hides Rcs_Id from
lint, so it won't generate a warning about an unused variable
in the code.
In other words, we don't really need Rcs_Id, and should
probably just delete it.
- Kevin Vajk
<kvajk@ricochet.net>
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