How to use make to manage program version

[Bob Stark]

I am using make in a non-traditional way, to build training courseware
documents together into Adobe Acrobat PDF files, and then have all of that
wrapped up into zip files.

I am slowly getting deeper into make, with the goal to automate a multi-step
courseware build process so that less technical people in my office can
perform it.  If a few typos are found in some material, it can be repaired
and new version rebuilt without involving me.

I currently set and track the courseware version number manually. When I go
to a new version, I run a program that updates the version number and date
in the footers of all the documents.

I'd like to automate this step, and keep a file in my directory with the
current version number, either in the contents of the file, or in the
filename. I need a few operations on this file, something like:

make showversion    # Show current version number and date
make setversion     # Set new version number into tracking file
make setfiledate    # Set filedate of all files to midnight on version date
make setfooters     # Store the version and filedate in document footers

These are just proposed externals, I'll come up with better names as it
shakes out.

What is a good practice for doing this on a win32 platform? The examples I
see involve UNIX tools like sed and awk, which I hesitate to have to install
onto secretaries PCs at work, but if that works for people, I'd do it, since
I already must install make, pkzipc, and my document manipulation programs.

Can someone point me to a good example or two of how this is done in
practice? An annotated example is worth a thousand words...


-- 
Regards,

Bob Stark [ProTech]