Hi, all-- I'm wondering what the Factor community would think of including certain kinds of metadata in the source code for vocabularies and for the Factor itself.
My starting point for this line of thinking was that I had played with Factor for a while a couple of years ago, then dropped it for a while ... and I wanted to know what version I had installed. So my first thought was to go to the listener and try version Nope. Okay, how about factor-version ? No again. And so on through several variations ... nothing. Nor could I find anything in the online help. Nor any file in the source directory to indicate the version (or revision date). And it occurs to now, which should be obvious, that I can probably use Git to find out some pertinent info. However: * Not everyone is using Git. * Version info is useful, not just for the purpose I mentioned, but also for debugging. * It seems desirable to be able to query version info via the listener, and probably also programatically for the purpose of checking dependencies among vocabularies. Furthermore, there is probably other metadata that would be a good idea to maintain. For example, if Factor becomes widely used, there might be a situation where different developers distribute similarly- or identically-named vocabularies. So we should have the developer's name, or email address, or some other identifier that serves to distinguish a given vocabulary from a different one with the same name. Personally, I feel pretty strongly about this; if I were in charge of development I would make at least the above-mentioned items *mandatory* for all language components, such that a vocabulary would fail to load or compile if it didn't include the required metadata. But I think I've said enough. I will leave it up to more experienced folks to decide whether and how to implement this idea. Thanks for reading! -- Matt Gushee m...@gushee.net ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ EMC VNX: the world's simplest storage, starting under $10K The only unified storage solution that offers unified management Up to 160% more powerful than alternatives and 25% more efficient. Guaranteed. http://p.sf.net/sfu/emc-vnx-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Factor-talk mailing list Factor-talk@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/factor-talk
