[Lazarus] Lazarus Version

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Tue, 8 Nov 2016, Mattias Gaertner via Lazarus wrote:

> On Sun, 6 Nov 2016 11:59:44 +0100 (CET)
> Michael Van Canneyt via Lazarus <lazarus at lists.lazarus-ide.org> wrote:
>
>> [...]
>> It would be good to have an option in the package system to write and/or
>> register the package version somewhere, so it is accessible at runtime, and
>> an application can query the various packages and their versions.
>
> AFAIK most users asked for the version at compile time. So it must be
> either a define or some consts in an unit like lclversion does.
> The defines would create many ugly FPC parameters, fpmake can't
> create them.
> The 'version unit' is compatible with all build systems and works at
> runtime too. It is not supported by codetools yet though. Maybe the IDE
> can automatically update/create such version units.

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. I don't know what 'version
unit' you mean ?

I have software which consists of many different packages which we control, 
from different SVN repos. In order to correctly identify the version of each
package on a production system, I need somewhere a registry of versions of
all used packages.

For each package I now create an include file with a version string which is 
written to a central registry. At runtime I query the registry and display
for all used packages the version number.

As far as I know, the version number of a lazarus packages lives outside the
sources, it resides just in the LPK. I now use some XML routines to extract
this version number from the .lpk and write it in the abovementioned include 
file. This happens in our build system.

I don't necessarily expect lazarus to provide such a central registry, but
to be able to have a version unit for each package would be nice, so I no
longer need to do the XML trickery or adapt the build system manually...

But please, this is a nice to have, it was just a thought after seeing the
lclversion tip.

Michael.