But it's not obvious, so I also have doubts about removing this line. If someday print options are changed, for example to support printing footers and not printing headers, or anything else changes in this function, the output might be unexpected with this line removed.
That part I didn't understand. How are we going to make this function less readable by removing the complicating part.
My point is, technically right now you won't see any difference in output
if you remove the line. Because if we get to that line the need_recordsep is already true. However, understanding why it is true is complicated. That's why if you remove the line people who read the code will wonder why we don't need a separator after "fputs"ing a footer. So keeping that line will make the code more readable. Moreover, removing the line will possibly complicate the future maintenance. As I wrote in the part you just quoted, if the function changes in the way
that need_recordsep is not true right before printing footers any more, then output will be unexpected.
