Re: Emacs trunk binary on Dropbox

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Dani Moncayo writes:

 > It would be nice if I could specify the bzr revno manually, for
 > example as a parameter to "configure" or "make", because having to
 > keep using bzr just for this little thing would also be too bad.

I don't own the code so won't quote it here, but XEmacs has a file
named "version.sh" which contains mostly static information about the
version: current major and minor, most recent patchlevel, beta status,
and something called "extra version info".  I forget how it's done (I
think it's in configure) but if hg is available, just do "hg id -i -n
>> version.sh", and then make includes that file so that the version
values are available in Make variables.  They may also be substituted
into config.h, I forget.  The latter would probably be easiest: add
a "version-extra-info" building variable to Lisp (in C), and add

#define VERSION_EXTRA_INFO @@VERSION_EXTRA_INFO@@

to config.h.in, and let configure do its thing using the bzr revision
number or revision id or both (I prefer both since people using bzr
who are off the mainline with local changes won't have useful revnos).

If you use a shell/make script, the tricky part is that it's essential
that the "extra_version_info=" line be last and unterminated with a
newline.

Presumably some similar could be done with lisp/version.el or
whatever as well.

I don't see why the maintainers would object to this, so feel free to
come up with a patch.