move git info into VersionNumber?

[nolta]

In preparation for non-git src packages, how about moving the git version info into the build number part of VersionNumber?

               _
   _       _ _(_)_     |
  (_)     | (_) (_)    |
   _ _   _| |_  __ _   |  A fresh approach to technical computing
  | | | | | | |/ _` |  |  
  | | |_| | | | (_| |  |  Version 0.0.0-prerelease+git.1331143345.ea72893483*
 _/ |\__'_|_|_|\__'_|  |
|__/                   |

A bit more inscrutable, but bonus points for being semantic versioning compliant (i think).

[StefanKarpinski]

Yeah, something like that probably makes sense. What's the 1331143345 bit about?

[nolta]

It's the unixtime, so they're sorted correctly. I'll replace it with a strftime(ymdHMS) string.

[StefanKarpinski]

Ah, I see. Hmm. That's actually a bit problematic since it depends on the machine it was built on. Using the timestamp introduces incomparability of versions that were actually built from the same code and can, of course, fail to compare correctly across different build machines. I think it may be better just to have the versions sorted arbitrarily (i.e. by git commit hash) — we shouldn't really be comparing versions based on build number in the first place. I know that they're defined to have a well-defined ordering, but why would you need to compare different build numbers — are you going to require something before or after a specific build with the same major, minor and patch numbers? Seems highly unlikely.

Also, I can't believe we're already up to the 1.3 billion seconds past the epoch. My, how time flies!

[nolta]

Agreed, adding the time isn't really elegant, but i was just trying to stick to the standard.

However, it isn't the build time, it's the commit time, so it doesn't change if you rebuild. And i think it's useful to look at the version and see that it was from Mar 01, for example.

[Keno]

I liked the way it was displayed before when git was used (with the commit and proper ISO time on a separate line). Could we change the version number in the way you propose, but still keep displaying the commit its time separately on the next line?

[StefanKarpinski]

Seems reasonable to me. That means there will be some redundant information but that's ok. There's also the issue that we probably don't want to include build info when the build is exactly the tagged version, but that's a relatively minor detail.

[StefanKarpinski]

Also, be aware that if Jeff sees this thread, he may just delete jl/version.jl altogether.

[nolta]

Ok, done.