Re: please put version timestamp inside .el files

[Eli Zaretskii]

On 8 May 2001, Dan Jacobson wrote:

> >> >> one feels unsure about the date of last change.
> >> 
> Eli> The last year in the Copyright line tells that.  If you want a more
> Eli> accurate idea, look in the lisp/ChangeLog file.
> >> 
> >> Seems kind of bug prone from a software maintenance standpoint.
> 
> Eli> The Emacs maintenance is not based on any of these.  We use CVS, so
> Eli> whenever we want to know who changed a file and when, we do a simple
> Eli> "cvs log".
> 
> But can the average end user also do "cvs log"?

Not now (there's no anon CVS access to the development tree), but in
the future they will be able to do that.

> >> Ok, if the
> >> changelog says on Thu May  3 03:41:39 CST 2001 Bob "Improved the
> >> search function retracker sequence to not xxx on situation yyy", I
> >> would still need 1/2 hour to analyze which of two similar search.el
> >> files is the one with the improvement unless the appropriate comments
> >> have been added to clue me in.
> 
> Eli> This situation shouldn't happen with packages bundled with Emacs.  All
> Eli> you need is to compare Emacs versions: the later one holds the
> Eli> ``improved'' version of any particular .el file.
> 
> as many users are using various emacs.rpm and emacs-el.rpm
> distributions, it's very easy to be unsure about what .el and .elc's
> one is using.

This should IMHO be taken up with the people who maintain these
distributions.  They shouldn't be doing this in the first place, I
think.

> With a simple timestamp in the file, we can avoid a lot
> of false bug reporting.

I don't think there's a lot of false bug reporting.  In fact, I can't
remember any significant number of reports whose reason was an
outdated Lisp file.