[Axiom-developer] About CVS & date marking (was: Re: On website and porting and other points)

[David MENTRE]

Hello Tim,

root <address@hidden> writes:

>>  - ok for the cutoff date (*yearweek*). But I still believe that the
>>    date should depend on the _sources_ and not the compilation time. I
>>    have not checked in current CVS however I haven't any patch to
>>    propose.
>
> I'm open to discussion about this. Do you know any method of getting
> the current source release information (assuming we update the sources
> at least once a day)? Can we do this automatically?

CVS proposes the $Date$ Keyword[1] that can be incorporated into a file
and that will be updated automatically on each commit of the file.

So we could have code like (excuse my common lisp):

-- In file yearweek.lsp.pamphlet --
(setq *yearweek* "$Date$")
-- eof --

The main issue is that the $Date$ Keyword is attached to the _file_ and
not the _whole source tree_. So if we modify for example a typo in
Makefile.pamphlet and commit the change, the *yearweek* variable would
not be changed.


Another solution would be to use CVS capabilities to execute scripts on
CVS commands[2]. We would thus attach a script to 'cvs commit' that
would put the commit date into the *yearweek* variable or check that a
mandatory policy is done (like updating the ChangeLog). I can't
elaborate more on this without digging first into CVS documentation. The
main issue with this approach is that we need to edit some files on
CVSROOT and put executable scripts on server; and I'm not sure if this
is possible on savannah.


Yours,
d.

[1] http://www.cvshome.org/docs/manual/cvs-1.11.6/cvs_12.html#SEC99
[2] http://www.cvshome.org/docs/manual/cvs-1.11.6/cvs_18.html#SEC165
-- 
 address@hidden