Re: bnv_have_qt

[Bastiaan Veelo]

Peter Simons wrote:

> Hi Bastiaan,
>
> I fixed a minor syntax glitch that the SGML parser uncovered
> and ran another update. It will be online soon.
>  

That is cool. BUT, would I have been able to generate the HTML myself, I 
could have visually checked the result and verified it with the CERN 
tools. I am kind-of coding blindfolded right now :-( Whatever tool is 
going to be used to generate the documentation in the future, I think it 
is a must that it can be run by macro contributors. It should be open 
source and straight forward.

> By the way: Is in intentional that you aren't using the CVS
> $Id$ tag to provide the version of the macro? I didn't bump
> your version now, because the differences are only in the
> meta-data, but per CVS the macro has version 1.14 now.
>
> Peter
>  
Yes, it is intentional. Version numbers are another tricky issue. We 
talked about that a while ago, and my conclusion is that version numbers 
need to be incremented by hand. I am pasting in from your mail dated 
2004/09/28 followed by my reply on the same day:

Peter Simons wrote:

> The archives on SourceForge.net and gnu.org run on the same
> CVS repository of macros, hence they should _always_ both
> have the same version numbers. That doesn't mean I am a fan
> of CVS keywords, I just wanted to point out that your macro
> does unfortunately break that rule because, well, here both
> archives are _not_ using the same version. If that were
> remedied, there would be no inherent problem with using CVS
> keywords.

The inherent problem is that when John Doe has downloaded a macro whos 
version is defined with a CVS keyword, incorporated it into his project, 
committed it to his repository, that version number changes to something 
like "1.0, doe". Then, 6 months later, he encounters a problem with the 
macro. He goes back to check the archive. But, having forgotten what the 
version number was like when he downloaded (probably never looked at it) 
the version mentioned in the archive has no meaning. Downloading and 
diffing is the only thing he can do.

That is bad enough. But if there are more than one archive and they are 
not in sync, and John is unsure where he got it from (maybe he got there 
through Google, and now Google presents a different one at the top of 
the list) he may actually diff his macro against a version that is 
older, and downgrade while thinking that he is upgrading!

This is not far-fetched: one of my users got his macro through Google, 
and I myself had to assess the differences between my macro's in the two 
archives to determine which one was the newest.