Re: Automatically keeping "last modified" up to date

[Allin C. <cot...@wf...>]

On Tue, 6 Aug 2013, Ethan Merritt wrote:

> On Tuesday, August 06, 2013 10:25:33 am Daniel J Sebald wrote:
>> I just built the most recent version of gnuplot and noticed that the
>> "last modified" date in the intro refers back to 2012 and is manually
>> entered.  Why can't that automatically be generated?  It would be nice
>> to do this so that when one builds/installs the latest version, upon
>> launching the program it is immediate clear that the install process was
>> successful by looking at the "last modified" date.
>>
>> Here are some approaches that could be tried:
>>
>> 1) There is this configure.in file containing:
>>
>> dnl $Id: configure.in,v 1.332 2013/07/18 23:22:17 sfeam Exp $
>>
>> Is that file somehow generated by the CVS/repository to reflect the most
>> recent modification of the repository?  If so, that would be great as it
>> would also contain a time stamp.  Could write a script to search for
>> that and define LAST_MODIFIED in some header file using the extracted
>> "2013/07/18 23:22:17" string.
>>
>> 2) Is there some way during make to get the most recent date of all the
>> pertinent files?  "make" does date checking, so perhaps there is a make
>> variable/macro that reflects that.
>>
>> 3) Similar to #2, we could maybe write an OS script that does the same
>> thing by looking for the date of the most recent file in the source tree.
>>
>> 4) Ethan keeps the ChangeLog up to date.  It would be easy to search for
>> the most recent date near the top of the file and use that as a
>> definition for LAST_MODIFIED.
>
> The file .../src/Makefile.maint exists for exactly this purpose.
> It updates the version string based on the most recent date in ChangeLog.
> This file is included during "make" by gnu make.
> Possibly you are using some other make program?

I think there's something wrong with this. I definitely use 
gnu make, but sometimes when I update from CVS, do prepare, 
configure and make, I get a "last modified" date that is 
(e.g.) 6 months ago and clearly wrong.

There's one other fishy thing in that neighborhood. When I do 
a cvs update it seems I quite often get the cvs 'M' flag 
indicating that src/version.c is modified, when I certainly 
haven't edited that file.

Allin Cottrell