Shawn M Emery writes: > > In the near future it would be nice to have some form of keyword > expansion whether in one form or another. If everyone is in agreement > then we may want to consider the keyword extension for mercurial which > allows fairly easy interface to expand and contract keywords: > > http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/KeywordExtension
I'm certainly not in agreement. All of the uses I've seen so far of keywords have been swill -- places where someone thought that the SCCS ID number on a single file somehow correctly labeled an entire module version, and where we were doing obviously at-best-questionable design. It may as well have printed __FILE__, __LINE__ and __DATE__. If we're to have version numbers printed by utilities at all, then at a minimum, let's make them administratively useful. They should relate _directly_ to the version number advertised as part of the packaging system so that we don't have to play fetch-a-rock with module versus package versus system revision history. This stuff should obviously work together rather than just being disjoint bits. (Having a big database of MD5 and SHA-1 checksums searchable on checksum is a nifty hack around the problem ... but it's still a problem, and shouldn't need a hack. You should be able to go directly from advertised version number to verified checksum in one step.) Short of that, please, no %I% or $Rlog$ spewage. We've got a nice chance to clean up some ugly history here. -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
