On 22-Mar-06, at 11:02 AM, John M McIntosh wrote:
Andreas is talking about using a UUID which for all purposes is unique. The hassle for the VM makers is that they need to remember to change the string in the callback when they build and publish a new VM, and also in OSx add it to the bundle info.
I think that's what I said. To avoid manual hassle - and hopefully cases where a uuid wasn't set or worse yet didn't get changed - you need to incorporate as much of it as possible into the automated system. It's not difficult to use makefile rules to always compile a tiny file with nothing more than the time in it - see platforms/ RiscOS/vm/sqRPCVersion.c for example- and that is a sort of uuid analogue that changes with every compile/link.
Another possibility is a 'Genuine Official VM' site where the act of publishing a vm onto the site creates a suitable uuid and incorporates it somehow. For RISC OS and OSX it would be trivial - write the uuid into a file inside the package bundle and the vm code reads that at need. For Windows it might be possible to run some program to comple the uuid file into the exe and for unix it would probably be simple since the server is likely to run some flavour of *nix. Development vms could include a default uuid file that declares them as unpublished and not to be trusted.
tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim when people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other