Subject: relax five-digit maximum on revisions?
From: Karl Berry <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2025 15:35:07 -0700
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

Hi Ileana and all - in ltmain.in, there is:

    case $revision in
    0|[1-9]|[1-9][0-9]|[1-9][0-9][0-9]|[1-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]|[1-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]) ;;
    *)
      func_error "REVISION '$revision' must be a nonnegative integer"
      func_fatal_error "'$vinfo' is not valid version information"
      ;;
    esac

Which allows for at most five digits of $revision.
Is there a technical reason for that, or is it arbitrary?
Can it be increased, perhaps allowing any number?

My friend Luigi (cc-d) incorporates the luajit library into luatex with
libtool. Luajit is now a rolling release. Therefore using epoch-seconds
or similar seems reasonable, since there is no specific revision number
other than that. For example, 1736781742 (corresponding to a couple
weeks ago).

Wdyt?

Thanks,
Karl

P.S. I speculate that there's a technical maximum of 32 or 64 bits, so
"any" number (as in \d+) would technically be wrong, but presumably such
a huge number will fail at some point. IMHO the user doesn't deserve a
nice error message if they exceed a maximum like that.