[tex-live] Re: Aleph versioning

[Olaf Weber]

Giuseppe Bilotta writes:
> Fabrice Popineau wrote:

>> Could you consider including the following patch? It makes Aleph
>> banner more consistant with the other engines. Also, the
>> lib/printversion.c C code parses your banner, but assumes that
>> there is no space char in it (which is not true in your case), so
>> 'aleph --version' results in incorrect output.

> May I offer a counter proposal?

> I think that the various version_strings should *not* contain 
> the leading hyphen, so I would rather change the banner to read

>> @d banner=='This is Aleph, Version 3.141592-',Omega_version_string,'-',eTeX_version_string,'-',Aleph_version_string {printed when \TeX\ starts}

> but I would rather not touch the version_strings (except for 
> the Aleph_version_string so as to remove the space).

> I've seen that e-TeX, pdf-TeX etc go the "leading hyphen" way 
> too. For them, I would suggest putting the hyphens in the 
> 'constant' string of the banner, removing them from the version 
> strings.

> What do you think?

I care very little one way or the other, though it is clear we'll have
to be consistent.  A few changes will have to be made in etex.mk and
pdftex.mk and some other locations, but it is all doable.

Please do drop the double-hypens from the aleph version string though,
it is mainly seen on the terminal, and very ugly there.

-- 
Olaf Weber

               (This space left blank for technical reasons.)