Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: tagline robustness

[Bruce Stephens]

wave++ <address@hidden> writes:

> You wrote:
>> I suggest that it could be better and safer if arch tag had a form
>> similar to RCS tag ($Id$, $Header$, etc.).  Even though RCS tags
>> have different purposes, their format should be taken by arch tags.
>> In this case arch tags will look like:
>> 
>>    For a C file:
>> 
>>      /* $Arch: 53bb84c6-dee0-46c6-a275-2db144993d89$ */
>>    or
>>      static char archid[] = "$Arch: 53bb84c6-dee0-46c6-a275-2db144993d89$";
>
> It would be nice to support different separators besides
> "$". Actually $ breaks many scripting languages and imposes that you
> should be able to disable it in this case.

As has probably been pointed out, this is likely to be useless.  In
RCS, things like $Id$ are useful because they change, so doing "ident"
on binaries tells you something useful about the source from which
they were built.  But in arch, the tag almost certainly doesn't tell
you anything that you didn't already know, so being able to embed it
in binaries isn't useful.  As far as I can see, anyway.  

Being able to embed revision information into binaries *is* useful,
but Tom's trick of doing that in configure seems the right way to do
it.