"C. Michael Pilato" <cmpilato@collab.net> writes:
> Fabien COELHO <fabien@coelho.net> writes:
>
>> Hello devs,
>>
>> While translating svn help messages in French, it occured to me that
>> the rationale for a separate commande 'svnversion', vs a simple
>> subcommand of svn, 'svn version', is quite unclear, at least to me.
>
> Well, for your specific suggestion, it's because there already is an
> 'svn version', which tells you what version of the 'svn' binary you
> are using.
'svn version' didn't exist when svnversion was written, it
was 'svn --version' only in those days.
> My reason for preferring a separate executable is that I don't think
> svnversion is something that your everyday Subversion user is going to
> use or care a thing about. In my mind, it exists as a utility program
> because its functionality isn't important enough to be a full-fledge
> 'svn' subcommand.
svnversion dates back to pre-1.0 days and was written when we were
considering whether/how to include the working copy version in the
'svn --version' output. I wrote svnversion as a separate executable
with the vague idea that it might be possible to run it during the
build and incorporate the information into the svn executable.
Nothing ever came of that idea, although svnversion does get run
during 'make install'.
If I was attempting to solve the problem of getting the revision at
build time today I would simply use the installed Subversion (which is
reasonable now that Subversion has been released but didn't make much
sense back in the 0.17 days) and fallback to something like 'unknown'
if it was not available.
--
Philip Martin
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Received on Tue Mar 22 16:59:07 2005