Re: [Monotone-devel] Keyword substitution?

[Todd A. Jacobs]

On Wed, Jul 27, 2005 at 12:40:23PM +0200, Richard Levitte - VMS Whacker wrote:

> Nothing stops you from doing exactly what monotone itself is doing,
> though; creating a separate file containing the current revision
> number and use that as the ident.

Sure there is: exported files. Not everything people keep in VCS is 
source code. Web pages, shell scripts, and man pages are some examples 
that come to mind where having some sort of version information embedded  
in the file itself would be very useful, and where an external "version 
file" would not be a reliable mechanism.

And of course, the problem with manually tagging files internally is 
that doing so changes the timestamp and revision hash, making it 
impossible to do without keyword support. With a manual approach, you 
can never accurately tag individual files or an "external" revision file 
which is maintained within the collection.

> no sense of individual files as there is in CVS, so there's no need to
> have the revision in each and every file, because it would be exactly
> the same in all of them.

The assumes that all files in a collection are always kept/distributed 
together. This is not always a valid assumption. Consider a repository 
of perl programs, where the perl programs are distributed independently. 
People post perl programs on mailing lists and web pages all the time; 
how will they tell the program versions apart with no embedded 
information?

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