Motivation and ideas

The motivation behind this application ?

Well, even in a small distribution the number of files containing things like:

version information,
date of distribution
references to archive locations (which contain version info too)

seems to grow like bacteria. Keeping track of them gets more and more difficult, missing some file during manual insertion of the desired information is bound to happen sometime somewhere. Another tedious thing is the generation of upto-date documentation. I got tired of this and thought that it should be possible to automate the whole procedure. Of course, there is an endless number of special case operations due to the individual differences between modules, so a fixed application will not do. It is necessary to provide some sort of interface people can hook into, to extend the capabilities of the base application.

The basic idea I had was to store an executable file along with the other parts of the module and to use that after retrieval to tweak the whole thing in whatever way desired. A shell script might have been sufficient, but I believed tcl to be more extensible and went in that direction.

The precursor to this package was more or less historically grown, i.e its interface to the preparation script was not really that much documented, idiosyncratic, and of course talked only to the repository here at home. Yes, the one described here does so too, but it goes over an documented interface now, so there shouldn't be problems to adapt it to other version management tools. That is a step better, is it not ?

Now that I have handled the background we might as well step into the dragon's lair.

First, the interface presented to programmers with the desire to incorporate this functionality into their own applications.
Afterward a brief outline of the phases the tool will go through during a build.
This is then followed by complete descriptions of all phases, the actions taken and their interfaces.

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