[Vm-dev] vmmaker.h?

Igor Stasenko siguctua at gmail.com
Wed Sep 2 22:23:29 UTC 2009


2009/9/2 David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com>:
>
> On Wed, Sep 02, 2009 at 02:38:05PM -0700, Igor Stasenko wrote:
>>
>> 2009/9/2 David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com>:
>> >
>> > On Tue, Sep 01, 2009 at 08:43:19PM -0700, Andreas Raab wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Is it possible to have VMMaker create a vmmaker.h file that one can
>> >> include to determine the VMMaker version the VM was generated from? It
>> >> would be enough if it says, e.g.,
>> >>
>> >> #define VMMAKER_VERSION "3.11.3"
>>
>> i think, it would be much better to have:
>> #define VMMAKER_VERSION  "VMMaker-dtl.138"
>>
>> and also, maybe:
>> #define VMMAKER_DATESTAMP  "3 Sep 2009 10:05 pm"
>
> Class VMMaker has a #versionString method that currently answers '3.11.3'.
> The value is changed (manually iff I remember to do so) when changes are
> made to the VMMaker package as a whole. This is a convention that Tim
> put in place a long time ago (at my suggestion actually), so it now provides
> a convenient way to provide an approximate version identification for the
> VM source that is generated from VMMaker.
>
> Ian has started identifying the Unix VM version (as reported in one of
> the system attributes at run time) using a string consisting of the
> VMMaker version and the Subversion revision level. This gives a reasonably
> good identification of the platforms code plus VMMaker code.
>
> Andreas suggested making the VMMaker versionString accessible as a
> macro definition, presumably so that he can do something similar to
> what Ian did, but without all the grepping and sedding. Hence this change
> to add the VMMAKER_VERSION macro in a header file.
>
> Generating the VMMAKER_VERSION macro is automatic now, so the only thing
> that a person who updates the VMMaker package needs to remember is to
> update the VMMaker class>>versionString method whenever something
> significant changes in the VMMaker package.
>
and then you have to keep a list of versions, like:

"3.11.3"  -> VMMaker.dtl.123
   or -> VMMaker.dtl.345
 and so on,
in order to quickly find the package version and then load it and
check it out...

Now consider , you are resigned, and all current VM devs are resigned.
But someone else joined and couldn't find any specs in mailing
archives, how to translate the
numeric version into corresponding package version..
And from then on, the only choice he's having is to download a VMMaker
packages one by one,
hoping that one of then will have the same version he looking for...
Ask yourself, do you want to be in place of such pool soul?

> Dave
>
>



-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.


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