Re: deleting rcs keywords from emacs sources

[Andre Spiegel <spiegel@gnu.org>]

On Mon, 2004-03-29 at 22:56, Richard Stallman wrote:

>     The problem with this approach is that the files would only be stamped
>     when *I* send them out.  When somebody gets a file through a different
>     channel, e.g. via Web-CVS, or because somebody else sends it to him, the
>     file won't have an identification in it.
> 
> Is it a frequent occurrence for you that people report problems in
> versions that of VC they got from CVS in this way, without updating
> Emacs as a whole from CVS?  Very few of the bug reports that I see
> seem to describe such cases.

It is hard to tell how frequent this is, because in the past, the files
people were referring to always contained version numbers, and so I
wouldn't know which path they actually took.

Myself, I have just recently built and installed a CVS snapshot of Emacs
at a customer site, because we needed some of the new features that are
not in any actual release yet.  I would assume that such installations
occur frequently all over the world, especially since there is so much
time between Emacs releases.  The installed source files are indeed
disconnected from their CVS history.  Now, if anybody were to discover a
bug in such an installation, in a source file without version headers in
it, it would be difficult to track down.

I don't have hard numbers for this.  I'm referring to potential
problems, which might turn out more or less severe.  (If I'm anywhere
near correct, it ought to be happening already for other files, which I
don't maintain, and which never had version headers in them.  Only other
developers could testify to that.)

You say that "very few" of the bug reports you see seem to describe such
cases.  So, if it actually does occur, and version headers would help
with these cases, then that appears to be an argument to keep them, and
to solve the problems they cause by some other means.