On Sat, 11 May 2013, Jed Brown wrote: > Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> writes: > > >> What is the utility of PETSC_VERSION_PATCH_DATE? > > > > In the current scheme we have: [for each petsc-3.3-pX tarball] > > > > PETSC_VERSION_DATE: date of the primary release [i.e when the first 3.3 > > tarball was spun] > > PETSC_VERSION_PATCH_DATE: date of the patched tarball release [i.e when > > 3.3-pX was spun] > > > > And we use PETSC_VERSION_DATE [manually transcribed] in a bunch of > > places. > > > > - https://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/ > > "The current version of PETSc is 3.3; released June 5, 2012" > > > > - https://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/documentation/changes/index.html > > > > - manual > > > > But PETSC_VERSION_PATCH_DATE: is the date the tarball is respun [with > > patches] - and that doesn't change the above docs. > > How is this information useful? Would it be simple enough to "release" > the manual once per feature release (3.4, 3.5, ...) so that it's date > would not need to be updated every maintenance (subminor) release and > then PETSC_VERSION_DATE would always reflect the date of the last > release? > > We could stop hard-coding these values and switch to obtaining them from > Git, in which case releasing would just involve tagging and spinning the > tarballs, but that automation can wait.
Right now PETSC_VERSION_PATCH_DATE is automatically set when the tarball is spun. [And we also have PETSC_VERSION_DATE_GIT - primarily for configure.log] So your suggestion is to remove PETSC_VERSION_PATCH_DATE - and set PETSC_VERSION_DATE [automatically during tarball creation] Also - I see petscnagupgrade.py checks http://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/petsc-dev/include/petscversion.h for latest release version info. So for the old versions [of petsc petscnagupgrade.py] to work - we'll have to retain PETSC_VERSION_PATCH [as you suggested] BTW: before switching the scripts to handle the new version naming - I created petsc-3.3-p7 tarballs with the current outstanding patches in the maint branch [via balay/maint-3.3-p7 branch]. If its ok - it can be merged into maint/master. ftp://ftp.mcs.anl.gov/pub/petsc/release-snapshots/petsc-3.3-p7.tar.gz [web page isn't updated though] Satish
