idea: a revision keyword expanded only at 'svn export' time

Every now and then someone comes up with the desire to have their
distribution tarballs / daily builds / hacked compilations to contain
the current revision number.

And always it's the same old tune "First of all, your working copy
might have mixed revisions, so a revision might be incorrect there,
but if you reallywanttodothis, then just grep the revision from 'svn
info .'"

Now, this is only an idea that came up on IRC, and I haven't really
thought it through, but it sounds nice, so I'll put it here.

Let's have a new expandable keyword that is only expanded when 'svn
export' is run and it is expanded to the revision being exported. Good
points about this:

 - It's finally a keyword that expands to the "current changeset
   version" as many people want it.

 - It cannot easily be mixed revision, since an export from an URL
   can't make such things - and with HeadURL, it uniquely identifies
   the path and revision from where it is taken from.

 - It subversively supports using 'svn export' for all sorts of
   "release" stuff instead of working copies - which I think is a
   very nice thing.

Open issues to still think about this:

 - What about exports from other working copies? Should there be a
   revision then? Or some fixed text such as "unknown"?

 - How's the keyword gonna look when not 'svn export':ed? Should it be
   just unexpanded? Or should it have some fixed text there as above?

 - Who's the poor guy who's gonna code all this? :-)

If someone thinks this is a good idea, this mail can probably be
stuffed in the issue tracker as a feature request - or it can be just
shot down right now :-)

But, I'm off to hit the sack for now.

-- Naked

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Received on Mon Dec 2 21:00:11 2002