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Re: Version numbers in the sources

From: Peter Gervai <grin_at_tolna.net>
Date: 2002-12-17 20:20:25 CET

On Tue, Dec 17, 2002 at 12:57:40PM -0600, B. W. Fitzpatrick wrote:
>
> Peter Gervai <grin@tolna.net> writes:
>
> > Please enlighten me, as this is one of the the weirdest things I've ever
> > seen.
> >
> > Why aren't version numbers in Subversion sources?
>
> We just don't use them because it's simple to find out the version of
> an item in your working copy by using Subversion (see below).

As I mentioned, it's not a problem with (sub)versioned sources but exported
ones. (without revision history)

> > I thought that some scripts (tools/ directory comes to mind) have missing
> > version header because they're unimportant, were created in 10 minutes and
> > is autor had better to do than propset svn:keywords. But I realised just a
> > moment before that the whole subversion source tree is one big versionless
> > heap of code. There is no way to tell whether the code on my disk is newer
> > or older than the one in the repos!
> >
> > Someone please explain this, or kick me while pointing to the entry in the
> > FAQ which explains this. And meanwhile tell the secret method everyone uses
> > to decide the relation between an exported file and its pair in the
> > repository.
>
> Ah. No kicking necessary. You want to use 'svn status' with the -v option:

Okay, I give an example.

I installed 'subversion' debian package (a binary distribution), which
contains the file 'commit-access-control.pl'. It have no .svn/ so no
revision history. (naturally, since binary distros don't include "fluff".) I
edited the file (some weeks ago), and now I wanted to check whether there's
a newer version in trunk or not. Trunk have full version history, but I
cannot 'svn diff' it since svn diff doesn't work with unversioned sources
(it gives "everything was removed, then every other thing was added"
result). I cannot tell which version did I modify since the timestamps
changed (I altered the file, remember), and no revision number in the file,
so there is no way to know whether the trunk is newer or it's just
different. (Obviously it would be a little bit easier if I would have
subversioned my copy, being able to see what I started from, but for some
slight changes I usually don't do it.)

Another example was when I had to decide whether my svnlook (binary) was
newer than the one in a tagged repos version or older. I can't tell, just
that "it have a different syntax", but to decide I have to go and check
trunk, compare their sources, etc...

svnadmin creates a repository and its hooks directory, but no way to tell
how new those scripts are. Are they one year old? Or just 2 weeks old? I can
go and check every revision of them in the repository (manually diffing them
against my copy), but I reckon it's a bit more user friendly to check the
beginning of the file for the commit date and revision number and compare to
trunk.

So it's about exported, distributed versions of sources (.pl, .py) and
binaries (no --version command and no version number in help), and some
user-friendliness.

Peter

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Received on Tue Dec 17 20:21:12 2002

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