Re: serial lines -- a proposal

[Peter Simons]

Hi Filippo,

thank you for your feedback.

 > I'm not entirely convinced by increasing at every commit vs
 > increasing only on changes on non-comments though.

Well, updating a macro without bumping the serial number is something
that you'd do in case you'd want users to *not* get that update when
aclocal is called. Personally, I can't think of a case where that might
be desirable. As far as I'm concerned, an update to the documentation is
still an update. Besides, I'm fond of the fact that this scheme doesn't
require any human effort whatsoever to compute a reliable serial number
for every macro.


 > How is [set-serial.sh] intended to be used? Before release serialize
 > everything then commit then tag?

Yes, exactly. I think it would work something like that, although I
probably wouldn't want to wait for a release before updating the serial
numbers. A cron job could do that automatically, say, once a day? Then
serial numbers would be pretty much up-to-date all the time.

The best solution would be to set up a Git hook that guarantees
up-to-date serial numbers in every commit to begin with, but I'm not
sure whether than can be set up on Savannah. Maybe it's possible,
though. I just don't know.


 > Anyhow, you can use git log --oneline and count lines, that will
 > hardly make a difference :)

Indeed, that's simpler than the current pipe. :-) Thanks for the
suggestion.


 >> Imagine that someone downloads a macro, modifies it, and re-releases
 >> that file using a serial number that's a *lot* higher than the one
 >> we used. If we'd import those changes back into the Archive, then
 >> our scheme would end up assigning the file serial numbers that are
 >> lower.
 >
 > Indeed, what if there's a note to increase the serial in a way that
 > sorts in the middle between ac releases? Judging from aclocal code it
 > seems that a trailing dot would be enough, i.e. 4. > 4 or for that
 > matter 4.number > 4 of course.

Yes, I agree. We should document that approach as a suggestion.

So, it feels like I might want to commit an update that assigns every
macro a unique serial number using set-serial.sh? Is anyone aware of a
reason to defer this decision any longer?

Take care,
Peter