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Re: bnv_have_qt


From: Bastiaan Veelo
Subject: Re: bnv_have_qt
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 22:58:36 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041007 Debian/1.7.3-5

I should add something. The below actually counts for the legacy format, not XML, because today the m4 source generated from XML does not contain any documentation except a reference to the online archive. That is not sufficient! We need at least a version number and a copyright notice. I'd prefer to have the documentation in there too. In other words, pretty much how the legacy format is...

Bastiaan.

Bastiaan Veelo wrote:

Peter Simons wrote:

[...]

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.



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