On the uselessness of $Id: ... $ tags

[Sigbjorn Finne]

> >
> > Not much more info than what can be gleaned from the file modification
> > time (and who's to say that the file hasn't been edited since
> > being taken
> > out of a CVS repo?)
>
> That's not the point: even *after* modification, the Id tag remains so
> that someone looking at the file can tell which revision the copy
> originated from.  Ideally it would point to the original project and cvs
> repo so that someone interested in the history of a file can track its
> cvs logs by following the Id tags.  A file which has travelled through
> several projects would have a string of Id tags, one for each project
> (you have to remove the '$'s to stop CVS from re-interpreting the tag,
> though).
>
> Probably I'm being a little idealistic...
>

Nothing wrong with that :) The RCS Id will get trampled on next you
check it in to a CVS repo (or the user might change it separately, for
whatever
reasons), so this story doesn't really work.  And, more to the point, do you
_really_ think ghc/compiler/prelude/primops.txt.pp will travel on to
some other project?

--sigbjorn "duke nukem"