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Re: Serial number formats


From: Ralf Wildenhues
Subject: Re: Serial number formats
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 20:57:04 +0100
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17)

* Bruno Haible wrote on Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 12:49:19PM CET:
> Ralf Wildenhues asked:
> > What exactly is the point of using a different format and extraction
> > code than aclocal does? ...
> > Gettext is using a format slightly incompatible to the aclocal one here,
> 
> aclocal exploits '# serial' lines since 2005-02-01. Gettext is using the
> format that you call "slightly incompatible" already since Jan 2002 at least
> (in gettext 0.11). What was the point of encoding in 'aclocal', in 2005,
> a syntax that not all widely spread autoconf macros were using?

A compromise achieved after discussion on this (the bug-gnulib) list:
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2005-02/msg00000.html>
Besides, unlike Automake, no other package has documented its (use of)
serial numbers nor their format.

Also, I don't understand what your intentions are:

If you exploit the inconsistently aclocal's inconsistent format, which
is what it sounded like a few messages ago, that sounds like you want
incompatibility on purpose.  But if you do, why are you even complaining
about aclocal being incompatible?

Without consensus on the question whether interoperability is desirable,
it is moot to discuss the format.  As I read the archives, at some point
in the past interoperability was deemed desirable by several members of
this list, and they even seemed to be willing to compromise on the
various different serial number formats that were in use at that time.

> > I have so far seen no reason
> > whatsoever why aclocal should change, rather than Gettext.  The aclocal
> > format for serial numbers can embody all needed information, as noted by
> > Colin.
> 
> Colin's proposal, to put the version number before the versioned item, was
> not serious.

You are being ridiculous (or my irony detector is malfunctioning).

If you want precedence, the C preprocessor generates similar line
annotations.  But precedence is irrelevant when there are backward
compatibility constraints: there are lots of files using aclocal's
documented format.

Ralf




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