On Sat, 20 Feb 1999, Ted Lemon wrote:

> The right solution to this problem, which I am merely proposing here
> and not suggesting you implement, is that the top-level makefile
> should maintain a registry in /var/pkg or somewhere like that of what
> version of utilities like this is installed.

Would it not be easier to embed this information in the tool itself?
Perhaps we could just put in a tag along the lines of

    $Tooldate: 19990217 $

so we could  use something along the lines of

    ident | awk '{print $2;}'

to extract it, and make comparisons that way? This would avoid the
problem of databases getting out of sync with real life (though
there's still a potential lack of sync for multi-program applications,
such as the cc suite).

Especially with ELF coming (where this stuff won't be loaded into
memory any more), I'm keen to embed lots of information into binaries
so that we can do things such as this and security vulnerability
checks easily. 

cjs
--
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   604 801 5335   De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.
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