[Axiom-developer] Axiom version numbering

[daly]

Ralf,

There have been long discussions of the version naming scheme
which are journaled in the mailing list.

The Axiom version is printed as part of the banner when you start:

                 AXIOM Computer Algebra System
                   Version: Axiom (May 2007)
          Timestamp: Friday May 18, 2007 at 00:44:15


This gives information about what version of source was used to build
the system (May 2007). It gives information about what day and time
the system was built (nearly 1AM on May 18th).  And the first line of
CHANGELOG gives an exact version in yyyymmdd format. CHANGELOG is a
stack. Thus:

20070617 tpd src/interp/inpter-proclaims remove unused arg from $FCOPY

This gives far more information than version 3.1.4.1.5.9
The drive for random numbers seems to have started from RSC or CVS.
Telling me that GCL is 2.6.8pre tells me nothing as that version
contains many, many changes.

We could also print the git ref which is an md5 hash code and
will guarantee which source tree was used to build. However we
aren't usually in the business of chasing such fine-grained bugs.

Tim