Re: Factor configure-time gcc version checks (patch 1/4 for PR 7305)

["Joseph S. Myers" <joseph@codesourcery.com>]

On Thu, 25 Nov 2004, Zack Weinberg wrote:

> I think this is a fine idea (though I cannot approve it) and I would
> like to encourage you also to break the version number proper and the
> date stamp out of gcc/version.c.  If we could have two syntax-free
> files somewhere (suggest config/gcc-version, config/gcc-datestamp)
> that were parsed by everything that cares, then we could eliminate all
> the remaining copies of those numbers, and people maintaining modified
> versions of GCC wouldn't have merge conflicts in version.c every time
> they updated from the official sources.  Oh, and it would be one fewer
> reason for gcc/Makefile to rebuild everything after a cvs update.

Note that doing this will involve changing update-web-docs, as the version 
number will then be in a generated .texi file included from 
gcc-common.texi; updating branching.html and releasing.html (remembering 
that releasing.html may be referred to by the RMs for older active 
branches as well, so needs to cover both cases); and updating gcc_release.

It would be possible to have a third file gcc-status containing "release", 
"prerelease" or "experimental" to determine the type of version and 
whether the datestamp goes in the version number, which would then change 
"prerelease" -> "release" in the release process and be parsed to 
determine the setting of DEVELOPMENT presently in gcc-common.texi, and a 
fourth file gcc-type that contains "FSF" for FSF mainline and release 
branches, or some other string for other branches and local modifications.

> By syntax-free I mean that these files should contain the literal text
> 3.4.2 and 20041124 (respectively, for example) and nothing else, so
> that using them is as simple as

I'd suggest the inclusion of a trailing newline after the version 
number/date.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers               http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/
    jsm@polyomino.org.uk (personal mail)
    joseph@codesourcery.com (CodeSourcery mail)
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