Version tracking (was: Starting a Magma/Seaside pilot project)

[David T. Lewis]

On Thu, Dec 22, 2005 at 01:39:30PM +0100, Cees De Groot wrote:
> On 12/22/05, Brent Pinkney <brent.pinkney at aircom.co.za> wrote:
> > It would be appreciated it you could suggest a light-weight
> > mechanism you would like to use for this.
> >
> 
> The lightest-weight mechanism I know of is MonticelloConfigurations.
> But I'm not sure whether kilana.unibe.ch has already been updated to
> accept .mcm files.

It might be too obvious to mention, but for a package such as Magma
that is maintained independently outside of the main image, a simple
version label can also be quite helpful. For example, in the OSProcess
package, there is a class called OSProcess with this class-side method:

versionString
    "OSProcess versionString"
    ^'4.0.1'

Just use some version numbering convention that makes sense to you,
and make sure you update it in your development image right after you
publish a new release on Squeak Map. Use Montecello etc for the real
version control, and keep the release names on Squeak Map in sync
with your versionString.

Along with keeping track of versions, this is helpful if you are
maintaining a lot of unit tests, and you want other people to
run them and report results back to you. For example, if you run
"OSProcess allTestResults", the versionString for several packages
and plugins are collected along with the test results (also the
operating system, machine word size, etc).

Note that class VersionNumber does some useful things (but I still
maintain a version string so I can have e.g. '4.2alpha').

Dave