CVS, dates, and versions

[Edward Glowacki]

Quoted from Edward Glowacki on Wed, Aug 01, 2001 at 12:34:58PM -0400:
> Quoted from Ben Pfaff on Wed, Aug 01, 2001 at 11:21:19AM -0400:
> > or if you want to enforce the ordering for some reason then
> > 
> > 	update: version
> > 		cvs ci
> > 		$(MAKE) output
> > 
> > Dependencies are your friend.
> 
> Ordering would be important in the case I gave above, as the CVS
> checkin needs to happen before the output is created, so that the
> date tags are up-to-date in the output.
> 
> > (Note the use of $(MAKE) above; here's the relevant explanatory
> > page from the GNU Make manual:
> 
> Thanks for the pointer, I haven't checked out the make man page in
> a while and all my makefiles are pretty simple, so I kinda forgot
> about things like this.

OK, I have a Makefile now.  For the version tracking, I have a file
called VERSION that contains $Revision: $ and $Date: $, and when I
want to do an updated version of the document, I force a commit
on the file, which updates the two strings.  This is only done when
explicitely called, or when I use make to do the checkin.

VERSION is included in whatever documents I want the whole document
version to appear.

I was thinking though, would it just be better to have CVS tag a version
for me, which would update all the files to that version?  The problem
I see with this is that even unchanged files would get a new version,
but I'm not sure how big a deal this is in practice.  I guess it's
a tradeoff between having a usable "document version" and having
useful version tracking information for the document.  Any thoughts
on a better solution?

-- 
Edward Glowacki			glowack2@msu.edu
Michigan State University	
"...a partial solution to the right problem is better than a complete
solution to the wrong one." (http://uiweb.com/issues/issue14.htm)