On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 09:53:13AM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > > However, I think you should put back the change to main.c that sets > > MAKE_VERSION if passed on the command line; I suspect either pkgsrc > > and/or sjg's portable release probably use it, and probably if we > > aren't going to put a dynamic date into it from the makefile, we > > should put a static date into it. > > Okay, I'll put that part of the change back. It causes no actual harm > to leave it. > > > Maybe what we want to set it to is something like > > [snip] > > That sort of date seems unobjectionable since it reflects the last > change made to the sources rather than the last compile date. However, > I'm not sure why one actively wants it given that you have all the > rcsid's already in the binary. Also, why would one want it more in > "make" than in any other program?
Well, remember make is an interpreter; the date goes into the make variable $(MAKE_VERSION) so the information is available to Makefiles. I don't know to what extent that variable is used, standardized, or historically expected, but given that Unix make has a large body of lightly documented "standard" and historical behavior, it's usually best not to remove anything like that unless one is quite sure it's *not* needed. -- David A. Holland dholl...@netbsd.org
