[Monotone-devel] Keyword substitution?

[Todd A. Jacobs]

I was looking through the montone texinfo pages, as well as scanning 
back through the list archives, and didn't really see this issue 
addressed.

Does monotone support any kind of keyword subsitution at all at this 
stage? In particular, having $Date and $Author keywords would be very 
useful when publishing files outside of a monotone repository.

I would imagine that version keywords are a bit trickier, but I have 
some thoughts on the subject that I'd like to submit for your 
consideration. The two main points of a human-readable version string 
are:

   1. To make it easy for someone without access to the repository to 
      determine if file X is older or newer than file Y.
      
   2. To allow the author to determine what revision within the 
      repository someone is referring to when they report a bug or 
      submit a patch.
   
It would seem to me that keyid+timestamp or repository+timestamp would 
serve the first purpose quite well. For example, consider:

   $Id: foo.c address@hidden 1122446580

where the number is just seconds since epoch. This would clearly 
indicate that the file is newer than:

   $Id: foo.c address@hidden 1122118546

and is different than:

   $Id: foo.c address@hidden 1122446580

despite identical timestamps.

For the second case, being able to identify that an exported file 
belongs to a particular repository, and what its internal version number 
within that particular repository is:

   $Revision: com.example.stable c0e645e63b6308b83d94b732888c2a1c39ad8b79

would probably be quite helpful.

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