version-controlmercurialversioningmercurial-hook

Software version number insertion

I have been thinking about a method how to insert software version number in form Major.minor.build into the source code without manual modification of the source code.

I have got an idea that all the parts of the version number will be derived from information comming from version control software (Mercurial in my case). Major and minor will be automatically filled by number of the tag (M.m) and build will be filled by the revision number. That is the idea.

As far as implementation I think that I could write a script triggered by some hook (probably the pretag hook). The goal of this script is to create a C language header file (e.g. Version.h) with following content

#define MAJOR   M 
#define MINOR   m
#define BUILD   b

The Version.h header will be included by module responsible for software version number publishing (in my case via filling several records in communication table). To actually fill the software version number into the source code it will be necessary to do second step - compilation where linker ensures expansion of the above mentioned symbolic constants.

Whenever I will release new software I will create a tag first (which assignes actual numbers to the symbolic constants above). Then I run compilation process to push the previously retrieved numbers into correct place in the source code.

Do you think that the suggested method is usable? Thanks for any suggestions.

Solution
    1. You can (in theory) build from non-tagged commits (or your tree will be overflooded by tags)
    2. For your model
      • 0.8.1618 (trailing {rev}) seems good, but think about possible history rewriting (which can change local rev even in the same repo)
      • 0.8.229f43b67c2a (trailing {{node|short}) isn't good for eyes, but good for historical explorations in most cases
    3. I think, you can use your idea with (probably) small corrections for you build-chain, based on ideas from article in Mercurial wiki and my suggestions:
      • Write full version (mayor.minor.build) in tags
      • Write distance from last tag into patch (for better readability)

    I have full version as tags, use own templatealias

    semver = "{latesttag}{ifeq(latesttagdistance,0,'','+{latesttagdistance}')}"

    for building usable and easy understandable versions string instead of suggested in wiki plain {node|short} and, as result, my current nice tip is shown as 0.8.13+38

    HTH