[dmd-internals] dmd-devel version number

[Leandro Lucarella]

Walter Bright, el  6 de February a las 10:42 me escribiste:
> >Thank you.
> 
> I want to use VERSION for much more than just generating a .h file,
> and having more information in there would mess that up.
> 
> What use do you intend for this change?

All comes down to reliably determining the version of any dmd 
executable. 
 
My particular need to need that information is because we sometimes end 
up using different internal versions because we need some bug fixed 
before an official release and currently is impossible. 
 
For the community I think this will be good for bug reports of 
non-releases. Personally I also find myself using some binary while 
developing and don't remember which exact version that binary was 
compiled from. 
 
Is a very common thing in big opensource projects too, and it will be 
specially useful for people reporting bugs for some unreleased version, 
either for betas or, as I said, if at some point in the future we ship 
nightly snapshots. 
 
Finally, I find particularly irritating that the version is not 
dependable. If you have a compiler with version X, then that compiler 
could be produced from any moment in the history of the source between 
X and X-1. Part of the job of the SCM is to keep track of the revisions 
of a program, and currently we are not taking advantage from that 
information. 
 
May I ask what other uses do you have in mind for VERSION? Do you think 
they could not benefit too from having a more accurate version (or even 
that it will have a negative impact)?

-- 
Leandro Lucarella (AKA luca)                     http://llucax.com.ar/
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