Re: Maintenance of BOOST_GIL_VERSION

Subject: Re: Maintenance of BOOST_GIL_VERSION
From: stefan (stefan_at_[hidden])
Date: 2019-03-29 14:15:50

Thanks Mateusz,

let me follow up to your question, though:

There are multiple possible purposes for a version number, and I think 
it would be useful to agree which of those we want to pursue:

* the ability for end-users (i.e. developers who work with Boost.GIL, 
but who are not themselves Boost.GIL developers, and thus don't access 
the library through the official git repo) to relate their version of 
the code back to a version we (Boost.GIL developers) would recognize.

* the ability to associate some form of compatibility metrics (API as 
well as ABI)

While I would like to see us (and Boost in general) strive for both, I 
think as a starting point we should at least support the first.

I think it might be useful to define a "build" step (or "install", as 
there is nothing else to build) that would generate some "version.hpp" 
file, injecting the output of `git describe --tags --long` (perhaps in 
post-processed form, to yield something akin to a "version triplet".

That's a practice already widely adopted in different circles, so we may 
even be able to find some code snippets for this.

Thoughts ?

Stefan

--
       ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...