Version information detail?

[dinkypumpkin]

On 25/06/2013 11:32, Robin Ellams wrote:
> Would it be helpful to other people to expand the "Version" info to
> include build or change date.  There were multiple updates to version
> 2.82 over a long period of time and it was became difficult to know just

Actually, there were no updates as such to 2.82 for Windows installer 
users.  You may have updated your installation manually by pulling from 
the Git repo, but anyone running the installer would always and only 
have installed 2.82, until last Saturday.  Anyone who runs the installer 
now will always and only get version 2.83

> which modified version was being used.  Extending the Version string to
> include the change date (i.e. 2.83 130623) might help. Perhaps it could
> even be incorporated in the change submission mechanism.
> At the moment I have modded get_iplayer.cgi along the lines of:
>      my $VERSION = 2.83130622;
>      my $VERSION_TEXT;
>      $VERSION_TEXT = sprintf("v%.8f", $VERSION) unless $VERSION_TEXT;
> and similarly get_iplayer.pl

There is a new installer in the works that will enable intermediate 
releases and stamp them with "semantic" version strings, e.g., 2.83.2.1. 
  The Homebrew installation for OSX already does this, while the package 
maintainers for the various Linux distros use whatever scheme is 
appropriate for their systems.  Anyway, the SWF URL brouhaha a few weeks 
ago caught me on the hop, and I thought it would be a bridge too far to 
bring in a new installer, so I opted to fall back on the existing installer.

Dates in version strings aren't very helpful since they don't record 
what you actually built on that day and may not usefully tally with your 
version control system (Git in our case).  It's not a big thing for 
get_iplayer, but it's useful to be able to pinpoint what code revision 
and installer build you have, which seems more useful.  Of course,  we 
could just increment the get_iplayer version number more often and not 
worry about intermediate releases. Perhaps my notions of versioning are 
a bit old-school.