"RCS $Revision"

[John Arbash Meinel]

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On 11/22/2010 2:53 PM, Michael Andronov wrote:
> Hello -
> 
> I'm wondering if bzr has a feature similar to "RCS $Revision"?
> 
> Basically, I'm looking into the possibility to put the the latest rev.
> number within the source file.
> It also provides the possibility to put:
> const char * rev= "$Revision$";  and print that out...
> 
> I'm looking for all info/advice regarding above:
> -- if it exists 'naturally' under bzr;
> -- if it exists as plugging;
> -- if there are particular reason why not to implement such feature, etc.
> 
> Thank you for your kind attention to this matter.
> 
> Michael.

It is generally recommended to look into "bzr version-info" either with
a template, or one of the default --format=?

This then gets put into a separate version file, which is then queried
at runtime. (version.c, or version.py, etc)

The main reasons are:

1) Mutating content you are versioning is a little bit icky. I believe
the bzr-keywords plugin does provide some amount of $Revision$, but I
don't know exactly what keys it provides.

Note that this is even worse when dealing with a branching+merging flow,
as both sides of a merge will have directly mutated $Revision$ even if
nothing else conflicted.

SVN is a little better in that it strips the field for commit and merge,
but has the problem that what you commit isn't what you checkout. And
has had quite a few bugs wrt commit at rev 10, checout at rev 12, what
should be in that tag? And IIRC, times when 'svn update -r12' does
something different than 'svn co -r12'.

2) $Revision$ in CVS/SVN is specific to the file, and doesn't give you
the overview of the codebase as a whole. a separate file can give you
both degrees of detail (--include-file-revisions).

(It could give you the repo revno for SVN, but generally only the last
time that file was modified, which means it is poor for a version.c file.)


John
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