use Perl

• Compatibility and security (Score:2)

  by Juerd (1796) on 2007.11.11 14:14 (#58979) Homepage

  I think that *incompatible changes* and *security fixes* are very important to indicate separately in a machine readable way. Just like security fixes make you install the new version asap, incompatible changes make you wait until you have tuits for updating your code. (And when they're there together, good luck.)
  
  For these, I suggest "i" and "s".
  
  Actually, single letters make bad identifiers. How about the following self-descriptive tags:
  
  new
  fix
  doc
  incompatible
  license
  maint
  security
  tests
  
  Where changes and removal to code is "incompatible" - if it's not incompatible, it's an addition ("new") or a fix.
  
  And please allow whitespace instead of T in the timestamp.

  v 1.00
  @ 1234-12-34 12:34
  # I'm so happy with this release
  security: fixed buffer overflow in Foo->cookies
  fix: orange should have been blue, not red.
  incompatible: removed emacs support

  Could even uppercase the tags...

  v 1.00
  @ 1234-12-34 12:34
  # I'm so happy with this release
  SECURITY: fixed buffer overflow in Foo->cookies
  FIX: orange should have been blue, not red.
  INCOMPATIBLE: removed emacs support

  Result: writable AND readable, and important things stand out because they're longer

  Reply to This

  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Skud (28)

    I agree with Juerd on all points, but most especially that using a word rather than a letter helps a lot with readability. So, what he said.

    --
    Kirrily "Skud" Robert perl@infotrope.net http://infotrope.net/
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by hex (3272)

    Compatibility, security, fix: agree that these are necessary splits to "bug fix" ("b" in my original scheme).

    Timestamps: these follow the format specified in ISO 8601 [wikipedia.org], where the "T" is a mandatory separator. I'd like to stick to an existing standard of date representation if possible.

    I think uppercasing is too shouty... adding the important marker would make you end up with "FIX! SECURITY! NEW!". It's a bit tabloid newspaper. :-)

    With all this in mind I'm going to post a revised spec shortly for a seco
    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Juerd (1796)

      I think the important marker itself is not important if you split out security/incompatible. If something new is important, bump the version number.
      
      As for the timestamp, you'd have two things, whitespace separated, instead of one. dateTtime may be the standard, but date time is much more commonly seen in the wild. And for a very good reason.