From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Fri Jan 10 22:29:34 2003
Subject: Re: CVS Octave is now Pix-free
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at jazz dot ncnr dot nist dot gov>
Cc: octave-maintainers at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 22:29:32 -0600

On  7-Dec-2002, Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at jazz dot ncnr dot nist dot gov> wrote:

| There is always version number, except of course that version number
| isn't an integer.  Would you care to define 
| 
| #define _VERNUM(major,minor,patch) ((major*100 + minor)*1000 + patch)
| #define OCTAVE_VERNUM _VERNUM(OCTAVE_MAJOR,OCTAVE_MINOR,OCTAVE_PATCHLEVEL)
| 
| Then we can do:
| 
| #if OCTAVE_VERNUM > _VERNUM(2,1,40)
| ...
| #else
| ...
| #endif
| 
| That allows for a 3 digit patch level, a 2 digit minor version and a
| 4 digit major version.  Room for growth for the next 50k years, no?
| 
| That allows us to do simple tests without a configure script.  Unfortunately
| it interferes with readability: to understand the code you have to know
| what was added in which version.  Maybe this is not such a good idea.

I think I'd rather avoid making it easy to compare version numbers.
Feature tests would be better, but even then it could easily become a
mess in no time.

It would probably be better to just try to ensure that the latest
versions (even if from CVS) will work together.  I don't think we have
the resources available to please everyone's wishes for backward
compatibility.

jwe