[Toybox] --version

[enh]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 12:47 AM, Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
> 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?

https://android-review.googlesource.com/#/c/147441/ adds the
equivalent 'git describe' to the Android.mk. for some reason my tree
with the remote has 0.5.1 and 0.5.2 but a regular tree only has 0.5.0.
but the hash is the more useful part anyway so this still seems like a
step in the right direction.

>> 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...)

clearly not an aarch64 user... but even for x86-64 there's been some
other good stuff lately. the ioctl disambiguation in 4.10, say. plus
there are lots of little struct decoding bugs getting fixed all the
time. including a few fixes for bugs i noticed while stracing toybox
:-)

>> 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

btw, is it deliberate that you have to do "toybox --version"? that,
say "top --version" says "top: Unknown option version"?

-- 
Elliott Hughes - http://who/enh - http://jessies.org/~enh/
Android native code/tools questions? Mail me/drop by/add me as a reviewer.

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