I think, or at least hope, this is the last of the "it didn't get delivered to list" re-posts. This one is from 2015-06-02 08:04, and was also sent to Sebastian, who answered me directly. Per his answer, reproduced below, I renamed the program 'Touch' to 'build-if-newer.sh' in r13246. (I post here in part because the commit message refers to this e-mail.) Since nothing has broken with the name-change (and some things work better), we could just delete the program entirely.

[Subject is the title of the last song on _Novella_, the 1977 Renaissance album.]

Can you tell me what the shell script "Touch" in directory P5/ is for? It seems to do "If anything in ../P5/, ../Stylesheets/, or ../I18N/ has been updated, then run a bunch of builds". But why, and more importantly, why is it called "Touch"? Is it executed from some other program(s) or only intended to be typed at the commandline?

This turns out to be a real, if minor, problem, because while most GNU/Linux systems default to case-sensitive file-systems, the Mac OS X "Darwin" commandline defaults to a case-insensitive file-system. Thus when running `make` on Mac OS X, this pgm gets executed when the Makefile tries to execute a `touch`.

I'd like to change the name of this cmd to Touch.sh build-if-updated.sh make-if-updated.sh or some such.

P.S. I'm asking you, Sebastian, because no one but you has touched this file (pardon the pun) in its entire Subversion hx on current SF (i.e., since 2007-10 when you "put back executable Touch").

SPQR> honestly, I have no memory of this script. i suggest you delete SPQR> it and see if anything breaks.