Re: RCS keyword expansion

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Oct 11, 2007, 20:47 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0710112144380.4174@racer.site>
In-Reply-To: <20071011155956.GC11693@cs-wsok.swansea.ac.uk>

Hi,

On Thu, 11 Oct 2007, Oliver Kullmann wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

> On Thu, Oct 11, 2007 at 08:09:22AM -0700, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
> > >>>>> "Peter" == Peter Karlsson <peter@softwolves.pp.se> writes:
> > 
> > Peter> I mainly want to have $Date$ expand in RCS/CVS manner, i.e to when the
> > Peter> file was last changed. Possibly even have an $Id$ that gives me
> > Peter> something useful (name and commit hash, perhaps?). Is it possible to do
> > Peter> this? Can it be done through git-cvsserver?
> > 
> > That's not a job for a source code manager to do.  It's a job for your
> > build/install tool.  See how "git --version" gets created in the core distro,
> > and follow that example.
> > 
> 
> This looks like a misunderstanding of what $Date$ is used for: It has 
> not much to do with a version number (such things are decisions by the 
> developers), but it is an identification stamp, typically used to 
> identify exactly which piece of code is involved in a given executable.

It does not matter if it is a date or a version number.

The problem is this: for efficiency, git does not change files which have not changes between the last version checked out (whatever that is) and the current version.

This seems counterintuitive to people coming from SVN/CVS: they expect _every_ file to be touched when checking out.

So there is not much we will do to accomodate in git; touching files which have not changed at all (even if containing a $Id$ or a $Date$) is not the way we want it...

As Randal already suggested: if you need something like this, you better have a build procedure which replaced $Date$ _at a given time_ (make install) with the current date.

Ciao, Dscho