[development] version = "$Name$" considered harmful in .info files

[Derek Wright]

On Jun 15, 2007, at 1:53 AM, Dries Buytaert wrote:

> That's probably a good idea.

I checked out a whole copy of contrib to test my perl/find on it.  I  
notice that there are a decent number of modules that do other things  
with version, besides $Name$.

Do people think I should just nuke all version strings checked into  
CVS in .info files, no matter what?

The only cases where it would be useful would be, for example, in  
HEAD, if a really careful maintainer committed something like:

version = 5.x-2.x-dev

to indicate that's what they were using HEAD for.  Or, I noticed a  
tiny handful that tried to be even more careful, and commit specific  
version numbers:

version = "5.x-1.0-alpha5"

However, chances are good they'll just get out of sync and be wrong  
eventually, so IMHO it'll be more consistent to rely on the automated  
tools for this stuff.

In total, find/grep/wc finds 223 .info files in HEAD that define  
version which don't use $Name$.

Of those, 40 are incorrectly using "version = VERSION". :(  Clearly,  
those should be purged.

The easiest thing for me would be to remove everything.  The docs  
already indicate that if you host your module on d.o, you just  
shouldn't commit a version line to your .info files.  People who  
download tarballs get accurate version strings care of the packaging  
scripts.  People who deploy from CVS can use cvs_deploy.module to get  
accurate version strings from the CVS branch or tag you checked out  
from.

The *only* cases that something committed to the .info in CVS could  
give a better answer than what cvs_deploy.module currently can  
provide is if you checkout from HEAD or DRUPAL-5 and the maintainer  
had done irresponsible things with the DRUPAL-5 branch that didn't  
follow convention, and that was really 5.x-N.* code of some sort.   
However, there's a relatively easy solution to this problem:

http://drupal.org/node/152282


In summary, 2 questions:

1) Any feedback on #152282 ?

2) Assuming folks are happy with #152282, should I just go ahead and  
remove version from all .info files on all branches in the contrib  
repo, no matter what?

Thanks,
-Derek (dww)