Re: Getting the CVS revision of Zsh

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jan 14,  2:33pm, Richard Hartmann wrote:
}
} My suggestion would be to introduce a new variable called
} $ZSH_RELEASE which is only filled if the source zsh was
} compiled from is tagged as a release.
} 
} Thoughts?

My thought is that all of this, including ZSH_PATCHLEVEL, should
never have been bothered with in the first place.

Either you're compiling zsh from source yourself, in which case you
should know what you're compiling; or you're using a package that was
installed by somebody else, in which case it's between you and that
somebody if you're having bleeding-edge non-releases forced on you.

If you're a packager like Debian or RedHat who occasionally ports
individual patches backwards or sideways or makes your own stability
patches, anything in these variables is going to be either wrong and
misleading to the end user or fabricated and meaningless to the zsh
developers upstream.

I was holding my tongue on ZSH_PATCHLEVEL despite my annoyance that
it uses the RCS $Revision: tag -- I mirror the zsh sources into my
own local repository, which means that tag gets rewritten whenever
I do a check-in, so my local build will rarely if ever match the
"real thing", hence it's useless cruft to me -- and I suppose it's
up to PWS if he wants to jump through the hoops to make something
like this appear to work, but I'm completely unconvinced by the
argument that they're in some way beneficial.