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by jmclnx 758 days ago
I think git is OK, but one item I miss is what CVS/RCS has, "$Id$". It is very difficult to see the version of a binary if its source is tracked in git.

Yes, someone said there is a way to get a git tag in the source, but the tag is not as easy to view as "$Id$" thus it is not obvious if it is the latest version.

But, curious he did not mention CVS and RCS :)

3 comments

I would consider CVS and RCS worth studying for historical reasons, since they have no releases for over a decade (according to Wikipedia). I was considering incorporating the history of version control, but there is already a great one here: https://blog.plasticscm.com/2010/11/version-control-timeline... -- it has a great comment section as well. Maybe it would be interesting to create an updated version of the article.

As for "$Id$", in bazel you would use https://bazel.build/docs/user-manual#workspace-status which works very well and can differentiate between stable and volatile.

Hilariously, that exact feature was posted here a couple of weeks ago, and roundly decried as being the worst thing about that era of CVS, and how horrible it was that it made reproducible builds impossible.
> It is very difficult to see the version of a binary if its source is tracked in git.

come on, this should be done by your build system. it's pretty silly to not put this tiny amount of work in.