Re: serial lines -- a proposal

[Filippo Giunchedi]

Hello Peter,

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 11:04:53PM +0100, Peter Simons wrote:
>  > 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.

Fair enough :)

>  > 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.

I don't like very much automated commits but I can't think of a reason why
this wouldn't work, however you'd still have to re-serialize right before a
release right?

> 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.

looks easy to do with a post-receive hook and loop-free, although a bit
unpleasant to have to git push then git pull again if something has been
updated, I can look into that if needed.

AFAIK you should open a ticket for installing git hooks at
https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?group=administration

>  >> 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.

indeed, README looks like a good place, something along the lines of
"Modifying AA macros in your project"

regards,
filippo
-- 
Filippo Giunchedi - http://esaurito.net - 0x6B79D401

In practice, nothing works. There are all these beautiful abstractions that
are backed by shit.
-- Brad Fitzpatrick