Re: [groff] mom date string

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Tuesday,  9 July 2019 at  4:30:56 +0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> Hi Kirill,
>
> Kirill S Sapelkin wrote on Mon, Jul 08, 2019 at 07:19:17PM -0700:
>
>> Just started using groff and mom (had been using LaTeX) for letters so far.
>> So far it seems elegant.
>>
>> Could not find a way to automaticaly insert the date at compile time
>> other than:
>>
>> .DATE
>> .sy date '+%e %B %Y'  > dater
>> .so dater
>> .sy rm dater
>>
>> Is there anything like this in mom?
>
> I don't know about mom, but consider whether you really want to do
> this.  I always found it extremely annoying when finding a directory
> of letters somewhere and they all had dates automatically inserted
> at compile time, so there was no way of finding the date that was in
> the letters when they were actually sent.  You can't always rely on
> the "last changed" date of the file itself: files often get copied
> around later.

I keep my files under RCS, and I've found that the RCS version is a
more reliable metric.  The macro is trivial:

  .\" Extract version number from RCS Id string.
  .de Id
  Version \\f(CW\\$3\\fP
  ..

You could easily modify that to provide the date (in the simplest
form, $4 and $5) of something like

  Id: vinum.mm,v 4.20 2003/06/29 04:33:42 grog Exp grog $

And of course this should extend to other versioning systems.

Greg
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