Re: `about-emacs' - what about the revno?

[Christoph <cschol2112@googlemail.com>]

On 8/28/2010 9:57 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> If the "revno" is important info for identifying an Emacs build, then perhaps we
>> should include it in such user-facing info.  If not, then perhaps developers
>> could refer in some other way (by date?) to the code that contains a given fix.
>
> This has come up before, but the discussion was inconclusive (IIRC)
> because of 2 reasons:
>
>    . revno is not unique: two different branches can have the same
>      revno for two very different code bases
>
>    . revision-id, an alternative method of specifying a revision, _is_
>      unique, but it's long and a mouthful:
>
>              eliz@gnu.org-20100828152310-v42vqrt01k788siu
>
> In general, a bugfix should appear in the ChangeLog files with the bug
> number, so you should be able to track bugfxes that way.

I too think having the revision available somewhere would be helpful to 
identify the weekly snapshot builds. Just a date is too coarse in some 
cases, imho.

The revno is indeed not unique globally, but if the branch is known, it 
is, right? So, why don't we supply to pieces of information: the revno 
and the name of the branch, e.g. the branch nick (available through bzr 
version-info).

For Windows, we could implement another make target, e.g. make snapshot, 
which uses make dist (for building the binary distribution) but also 
inserts the revno and branch nick information somewhere. I am not sure 
how useful this information is for official releases, but if it is 
considered useful, we can just add this to make dist even.

I like the combination of revno and branch name better than the 
revision-id. It seems easier to correlate these with the current state 
of the trunk using bzr log.

Christoph