Re: [boost] Revision history comments (WAS: compile time asserts)

From: Beman Dawes (beman_at_[hidden])
Date: 2000-08-01 13:55:21

Joerg Schaible wrote:

 >Beman wrote:
 >
 >> *  I like a "Revision History" comments.  True, CVS supplies history, 
but
 >> for casual reading a simple Revision History helps.  Or is that just
 >> personal taste on my part?  I don't think we ever discussed it.
 >
 >
 >I am not very fond of this anymore. Seems nice at first sight, but for 
files
 >with frequent changes (it seems that most of the boost files apply) it is 

 >absolutely nasty if you have to scroll through screens of history 
changes.
 >Even more because the change comment may not be closely related to the
 >change in a file itself (submitting a large number of files at once) or 
the
 >change comment has not a real message concerning the file history e.g.
 >"Syntax error corrected". So they just increase disk space in the
 >repository, increase compile time, increase web traffic, and are not
 > much of use due to the noise within the comments itself. If I am
 > really interested I can request CVS.

Good points, Joerg.  I guess I haven't really thought out all the 
implications and benefits of CVS.

We have usually been including a comment in boost files:

//  See http://www.boost.org for most recent version including 
documentation.

We could change that to:

//  See http://www.boost.org for documentation, updates, and revision 
history.

We can remove the current revision history comments, since they are in the 
current code base, and thus in the CVS repository already.

On the web site, we can link to the CVS repository 
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/?cvsroot=boost.  We would 
note that the repository can be browsed and diff'ed without becoming a 
member of either the boost mailing list or SourceForge.  (We want the link 
on the web site rather than in the source code, since the URL for the 
repository is subject to future change.  We don't want old copies of source 
code to contain a dead URL.)

Comments?

--Beman