Re: Getting the CVS revision of Zsh

[Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>]

(I've moved this to zsh-workers, there doesn't seem to be anything left
of use to general users.)

Bart Schaefer wrote:
> If you're a packager like Debian or RedHat who occasionally ports
> individual patches backwards or sideways or makes your own stability
> patches, anything in these variables is going to be either wrong and
> misleading to the end user or fabricated and meaningless to the zsh
> developers upstream.

If that was what was going on, I would agree, but I did this on the
understanding that someone, for what ever reasons, might ship an
intermediate CVS checkout substantially unchanged as a development
package.  In fact, I thought this was basically what Debian did.
("Ship" might also mean "install for local users because they need a bug
fix or new feature before the release", or something of that kind.)
Then $ZSH_PATCHLEVEL tells you where it came from and what you can do
with it.  It gives the developers more information, too, if some
packaged is tracking CVS, without the package maintainers getting
involved.  It's worse than making a proper release, but better than not
having any idea about the provenance of the shell.

If someone is really bundling individual patches with zsh, so that it is
different from any CVS checkout, then I would urge them to alter
$ZSH_PATCHLEVEL to avoid exactly the sort of confusion you describe.  I
can add a config option to fix a patchlevel if this is useful.

> I was holding my tongue on ZSH_PATCHLEVEL despite my annoyance that
> it uses the RCS $Revision: tag -- I mirror the zsh sources into my
> own local repository, which means that tag gets rewritten whenever
> I do a check-in, so my local build will rarely if ever match the
> "real thing", hence it's useless cruft to me

Surely you can turn keyword expansion off on that file, if you want?
However, if you're never going to use it anyway then it *is* useless
cruft to you, of course.  By this definition a large part of the shell
is useless cruft to me, too.

Actually, I suspect I *will* use this myself occasionally.  It answers
those occasional development questions "did I install the version with
that bug fix, or did I just compile it, or am I dreaming again?"  No,
this is not a typical user case but for a few dozen bytes it's worth
it.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR PLC, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road
Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070