[drupal-devel] RFC: drupalversions.module

[Chris Johnson]

This whole idea of making it easier for site administrators to identify which 
release and versions of core code and modules is one I've brought up several 
times before over the past couple of years.  I have even submitted several 
patches against core to support the idea, and at one time even coded an 
XML-RPC module which would allow third-party remote support and problem 
reporting which would provide version info as needed.  It always seemed to 
fall on deaf ears, so I am really happy to see some people showing interest in 
this idea.

As a site administrator with multiple Drupal sites to manage, the things I 
most often want to know are:

1.  What is the release version of the core that is running?
2.  Which additional modules and themes are installed?
3.  What are the versions of those additional modules and themes?
4.  What version of the database update is the site at?
5.  Have any of the source files been patched locally?  (I generally try to 
stay away from doing this precisely because it makes management and upgrading 
more difficult, but sometimes it's necessary.  Being able to easily identify 
when that has been done is really useful.)

Bèr Kessels wrote:
> Id say: just use the hook_help for this.
>  case "admin/versions#mymodule" 
>    return '$id$ for 4.6'
> 
> $id$ is filled from svn/cvs. 4.6 must be hand-edited on a release

Using the RCS/CVS $Id$ keyword string only works for answering the fine grain 
questions.  It will more often be useful with contrib modules than anything 
else.  For the rest of the code, I want the release version, which can be 
gotten from the $Name$ keyword string -- if a release is symbolically tagged, 
and then checked out explicitly with that tag (as it should be!) when building 
the downloadable tarballs.

Every version control system I've ever seen has this idea of version keywords, 
so if we move to Subversion or something else, we may need to change $Id$ and 
$Name$ to some other keyword, but it will be a global search/replace to do so.


For some of my previous efforts, see:

http://drupal.org/node/20439
http://drupal.org/node/20448
http://drupal.org/node/20445
http://drupal.org/node/20444
(4 different patches for head and 4.6, core and contrib)

http://drupal.org/node/15818

--
Chris Johnson