[Toybox] --version

[Rob Landley]

On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 12:51 PM, enh <enh at google.com> wrote:
> in ad602aa127e44eade76fbb05fd27ee8f5825282a you added a --version that
> outputs a constant string defined in main.c. i just wanted to point
> out that -- for the foreseeable future until toybox is "mostly done"
> -- this means Android will pretty much always lie. we'll be some
> random SHA ahead of that version. (right now, for example, we're far
> ahead of 0.5.2 but will claim to be 0.5.2.)

Yup. I don't really have a good answer to that.

I suppose I can add plumbing that _if_ it's built from git (release
tarballs aren't) then use the git describe --tags output, otherwise
fall back to the VERSION file? Hmmm...

> you mention in the checkin comment that you don't trust yourself to
> keep things up to date --- did you consider setting it in the makefile
> instead and grepping the version out of the www/ directory?

Yes, and I'm even less likely to remember to update it there.

> or, if you plan on having an rpm spec file or equivalent, from there?

I'm all for people packaging toybox in RPM. And in .deb. And in gentoo
ebuilds for portage. And in pacman for arch. And in bitbake for
openembedded and yocto and tizen. And in slack packages. And in
buildroot. And maybe android apk works in there somehow, or ipkg or
opkg. And apparently sabotage is creating one called "butch"...

Am I having toybox depend on any of that? Nope.

> _i_ don't care, but if people report toybox-on-Android bugs to you
> rather than to me, you might have a confusing time with the current
> setup.

Good point.

Try now?

> even if you surrounded the #define with #ifndef, i'm not sure what i'd
> set it to in the makefile. version numbers don't really make much
> sense until you're old and stable. we still have trouble with strace
> because although they're old they're still very much under active
> development, and often in areas we need (such as aarch64 support) or
> want (like the recent ioctl disambiguation improvements). so strace
> --version is always a lie on Android too. (but strace doesn't ship as
> part of the system image, so only a developer would ever notice and
> hopefully they'd be looking at git log anyway.)

I have static strace binaries at http://landley.net/aboriginal/bin for
various architectures but I hadn't hugely noticed the need for regular
version updates on them? (Modulo that time powerpc system calls
changed...)

> probably not going to be a problem -- i pretty much always have to ask
> "what version of Android?" on any bug report anyway -- but i thought
> i'd mention it.

As long as I've added --version I might as well do it _right_, it's
good to raise issues so I finish fixing the problem.

Rob

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