From maintainers-request at octave dot org Fri Mar 24 06:45:06 2006 Subject: Re: comparing version numbers From: Paul Kienzle To: David dot Bateman at motorola dot com Cc: octave maintainers mailing list Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2006 07:43:46 -0500 On Mar 24, 2006, at 3:46 AM, David Bateman wrote: > Paul Kienzle wrote: > >> >> On Mar 23, 2006, at 5:22 PM, John W. Eaton wrote: >> >>> I changed the version number in CVS earlier today to be 2.9.5+ and >>> the >>> following test from cell2mat.m is now failing: >>> >>> %!test >>> %! if ([1e6,1e4,1] * str2num (split (version, '.')) > 2010064) >>> %! assert (cell2mat (D), F); % crashes octave 2.1.64 >>> %! endif >>> >>> Do we really need the version number test here? >>> >>> If there is a need to compare version numbers, then perhaps we should >>> have a function to do it that can handle things like 2.9.5+ or >>> 2.9.5+SVN-serial-number (or similar). >>> >>> Comments? >> >> >> When deploying software which depends on Octave I do not >> want to force people to upgrade. In order to support >> older versions there will sometimes be a need to compare >> version numbers. Alois' NaN and TSA packages in >> octave-forge/extra are designed to support multiple versions >> of octave and matlab if you want a real world example of the >> sort of tests that are needed.* >> >> - Paul >> >> > Paul, > > The difference here is that cell2mat.m has migrated to octave and so > the > version in octave is always particular to the version of octave with > which it was delivered. In that case it doesn't make sense to have a > version number test like this. I agree completely with the case that > octave-forge, and any eventual external packages might need such tests > however, and that we need a means of testing version numbers, including > any version numbers for CVS versions.. Agreed. Furthermore, with the 2.1.x branch and the 2.9.x trunk we are free to purge a lot of tests from octave-forge as well. - Paul