[drupal-devel] release info, introspection and debug

[Chris Johnson]

Once upon a time, like around release 4.1 or 4.2, I started coding a module 
which would enable several debug features, both locally and remotely.  One 
part of that was an XML RPC which could be turned on administratively which 
would allow a query to return some information about the Drupal installation. 
  The information was intended to be items which would help debugging a 
problem, providing support or reporting bugs/problems in the software.  The 
module would gather the information and send it as a returned array from the RPC.

Unfortunately, I accidentally deleted my work before it got backed up or 
committed to my local CVS.

One of the roadblocks I had at the time was no good way of knowing which 
versions of the various pieces of the Drupal software were being used.  Since 
then, partly because of my asking for it, all (most?) Drupal files have a $Id$ 
CVS keyword in them, in a comment line.  At a minimum, that would allow an 
fopen() or similar to be used to find out what versions of files were being 
used.  Not the most beautiful way of handling this issue, but at least workable.

Another problem that I was trying to solve then, and that I still run into 
often now while managing half a dozen or so Drupal-based sites in my so-called 
spare time is knowing which version of software they are currently running.  I 
can figure this out eventually via one method or another, but it would be so 
nice to be able to just view it from the admin options.  This piece of 
information would also be useful for the previously mentioned debug/reporting 
module, too.

To that end, is there any chance we could make it convention that all Drupal 
files would, in addition to the $Id$ keyword, include the $Name$ keyword?


And if all that sounds reasonable, I'd like to mention briefly a common coding 
pattern for handling just this kind of question, and one which I also use in 
most source files.  That is, make these version and release strings available 
to the program itself without file reading (fopen()) introspection tricks.

Extremely common example from C (source code to most Unixes):

#if 0
static char sccsid[] = "@(#)w.c 8.4 (Berkeley) 4/16/94";
#endif
static const char rcsid[] =
   "$FreeBSD: src/usr.bin/w/w.c,v 1.38.2.7 2003/08/15 21:58:14 rwatson Exp $";


Similarly, in PHP:
$version  = "\$Revision: 1.6 $";
$release  = "\$Name:  build_1_2_19 $";

Any chance of doing something like that with Drupal?  If not in all files, 
maybe just the release in common.inc?

--
Chris Johnson