[armedbear-devel] Start up message suggestion

[Ville Voutilainen]

On 30 January 2011 19:24, Mark Evenson <evenson at panix.com> wrote:
> On 1/26/11 11:58 PM, Blake McBride wrote:
>> Greetings,
>> I've got a suggestion regarding the startup message on development
>> versions of abcl.  Rather that just saying "-dev" why don't we say "-dev
>> (XXX)"  where XXX is the subversion revision number?  This would make it
>> much more clear about what you are running, and I'm pretty sure
>> subversion can automatically provide and update this (I am doing it
>> elsewhere).
> We kicked this around once running into the following problems:
> The version of SVN source is not readable from the filesystem (i.e. via
> a grep), but needs the SVN libraries to access it.  The executable
> 'svnversion' that does this is not always available (is it available
> under TotoiseSVN or not?  I forget what the answer to this turned out to
> be…)

This seems a non-issue at least to abcl developers, so it's an issue only for
people who build abcl themselves. Furthermore, at least on my system
the version _is_ greppable from .svn/entries.

> 0.  Since there is no SVN tag expansion (like $Revision$) that would
> output the current SVN version, we have to move the canonical value

Uh what? The id expansions at the top of our files expand the revision
as well as other information.

> 1.  The file 'org/armedbear/lisp/version' will be created during the
> build process (it currently is) with the base value appended with the
> string "-<OUTPUT of svnversion>" or "-unknown" if 'svnversion' couldn't
> be invoked.  Examples would be "0.24.0-exported" "0.24.0-12344"
> "0.24.0-13111:13112M".

The middle one looks almost like what we're after, but it can just as
well say "-dev" somewhere in the string. We have that information
hardcoded in Version.java, so we should somehow get it from there
and just append the revision number. It seems to be a simple problem
and I'd expect a simple solution to work.