[asdf-devel] *ASDF-REVISION*

[Robert Goldman]

Gary King wrote:
> Hi Robert,
> 
> I didn't know about --tags; please try now and see what shakes out.

That seems to have fixed it:

[rpgoldman-2:~/lisp/asdf] rpg% git describe --tags
1.362-2-g07f9837

> 
> We should think more about
> 
> 
>> http://www.question-defense.com/2009/03/13/software-revision-numbers-with-git-tag-and-git-describe/
>>
>>
> 
> This, by the way, was my birthday and therefore some sort of sign of the
> cosmic unconscious.
> 
>> I believe that if we were to get your tags into our clones of your
>> repository, we could figure out a way to get the *ASDF-REVISION* set
>> properly.
>>
> 
> Yes.
> 
>> Any reason why we shouldn't just butcher a version number string into
>> the file when we release it, instead of doing the current rigamarole?
>> Or is there a git wizard, who can supply a better alternative?
> 
> 
> Well, the tag is in the _released_ file; just not in the repo; that'll
> be the next step.

I have been pondering this, admittedly from the point of view of someone
who is git-illiterate (ilgiterate?), and the more I think about it, the
more I like this solution:

(defvar *asdf-revision* "1.362")

This has the immense advantage of simplicity going for it.  The
alternatives that I gather from reading Linus, et al. all seem
ill-suited for the CL world.  They seem to rely on (1) source to source
textual translation /outside/ the lisp environment (e.g., Linus proposes
to push the version number from git tags into into the Makefile) and (2)
easy access to the standard unix toolchain (make, perl, git).  But
access to the unix toolchain, portably, from CL is not a nice thing, and
it doesn't come cheap.  Worse, getting this right relies on some tricky
logic to detect the fact that you're running from a git working
directory (so you haven't had textual substitution performed during the
export process), and so need to take an excursion through git-describe.

I'm OK with coming up with an elegant solution that fixes this
automagically using git tagging, git describe and so on, but until the
messiah comes, how about we do the dumb thing and just stick in a string
constant?*

"Il meglio, e l'inimico del bene" [the best is the enemy of the good]
--- Voltaire


*If you want, you could make a shell script that wraps around the git
tag command, incrementing the release number, pushing the release number
into the *asdf-revision* defvar, committing the change, and then
applying the tag.  That would be pretty much automatic, but the logic
wouldn't have to be replicated everywhere that asdf is loaded.