David Holland <dholland-sourcechan...@netbsd.org> writes: > On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 09:24:12AM -0600, M. Warner Losh wrote: > > : > Well, remember make is an interpreter; the date goes into the make > > : > variable $(MAKE_VERSION) so the information is available to Makefiles. > > : > > : Yah, but it is largely worthless. Consider that different branches > > : have non-linear relationships in dates and features being present. > > > > Consider building NetBSD 0.9 today. As it was, MAKE_VERSION would > > seem quite modern, but the make would really be quite old. > > Using the last rcsid time would at least fix that...
Not really, because branches have non-linear temporal connections to each other. Again, I think that if one wanted to be serious about this, one would need to have manual management of version numbers. That, of course, runs into the trouble that FreeBSD and OpenBSD also maintain their own versions of pmake. 1) I think this is a solution looking for a problem. 2) I also think the solution is kind of hopeless in practice. I used to put date stamps into my binaries all the time, mostly because I thought it was neat. I've stopped, because I realize it is kind of hopeless in the real world. Perry
