Re: Canonical location for emacs-version string in source tree?

[Ken Raeburn]

On May 20, 2010, at 12:57, Jeff Kowalczyk wrote:
> Gentoo GNU/Linux's packaging of emacs bzr trunk recently adapted to a bzr
> changeset that removed one of the several copies of emacs-version (e.g.
> "24.0.50") found in the source tree [1].

Well, it moved it, from version.el to emacs.c.

> Can one of these locations in the source tree  (i.e. emacs.c or configure.in) 
> be
> designated as the canonical location for packagers to find the version string?

I thought about moving in that direction a bit when making my change, but the C 
code needs to get the value easily at compile time on both UNIX and Windows 
platforms, which rules out using autoconf's PACKAGE_VERSION (unless we can 
generate PACKAGE_VERSION on Windows) and using non-trivial scripts to extract 
it from configure.in or elsewhere (unless someone wants to write and debug both 
versions).

I'm not opposed to someone doing the work; I just couldn't effectively do it 
myself at the time, and didn't need it for my work.  And for Emacs maintenance 
itself, there are scripts and lisp packages (not distributed in the Emacs 
package) that know where the version strings live and how to update them 
consistently, so there hasn't been a big demand to reduce them all to one 
master source location.

If you need to pick one place, then I think for now emacs.c is the right place.

Ken