Scripts versioning

[johnd0e]

Currently every version number contains date/time stamp as it's last component.

So with every build every script get newer version, even if it's content stays the same.

With this system if we turn on auto-updating feature - it will fire unconditionally, on every new build.

I don't think that it is good design, as typically we want to update changed scripts only.

[angel93ayora]

"ideal" solution would be to only change timestamp when first component is updated, complex because last component is calculated on build time and you need the last build to be able to read the last component (timestamp) you built time ago

another shoulution would be to not inject timestamp, or to do it only on test versions

[johnd0e]

another shoulution would be to not inject timestamp, or to do it only on test versions

Exactly.

[modos189]

I'll add that we need to reduce the number of dots to the version number. Some userscripts managers report an error

// @version 0.3.0.20190103.162834

Required value' version' is missing or invalid. It must be between 1-4 dot-separated integers...

[modos189]

another shoulution would be to not inject timestamp, or to do it only on test versions

I like this solution. And I need to remove point between date and time.

[johnd0e]

So I propose to remove .@@DATETIMEVERSION@@ completely, both for Release and Test-builds.
May be we should add it to local builds (discussion needed).

[johnd0e]

So I propose to remove .@@DATETIMEVERSION@@ completely, both for Release and Test-builds.

• 'release' scripts do not need 'datetime' as version alone is just enough
• in 'test-builds' we either also need increment version after each commit, or continue using 'datetime' as 4th component.
  But even if we change only some 1 script - all other scripts in the project also get new 'datetime', which lead to total unconditional autoupdating.
  I do not like it.

But there is another option: what if 'datetime' would be not just 'build time', but actual timestamp of every file?

Bonus: it let us to (re)build only actually changed files.
BTW, the idea is not new:

ingress-intel-total-conversion/build.py

Lines 174 to 176 in d77562b

	def saveScriptAndMeta(script, ourDir, filename, oldDir=None):
	# TODO: if oldDir is set, compare files. if only data/time-based version strings are different
	# copy from there instead of saving a new file

[gusowski1]

One reason where the @@datetimeversion@@ could make sense is the following use case.

Some code in the @@PLUGINEND@@ or @@PLUGINSTART@@ is changed the script itself is a newer version. In This case you need to bump the version of each script manually, otherwise the script itself won't be updated and the new code in the start and endsection wouldn't be changed.

One other way could be to change from @@datetimeversion@@ to something like the revison number.
But that doesn't change the problem.
As long as a build could change the scriptoutput we need some aditional parameter in the version of the script

[johnd0e]

There is not so simple with #135, but anyway I think that it would be better just to get rid of dateTimeVersion, completely.

@version already has 3 components, and it's enough for most purposes.

May be we can keep dateTimeVersion for development purposes, but then we should add it only for strictly specific targets, e.g. local or dev.

[1valdis]

@johnd0e

version already has 3 components, and it's enough for most purposes.

Agreed. That's how semantic versioning works, and I think you should stick with this too.

[johnd0e]

So I propose to remove timestamp component from release build.
But it is still useful for local builds and test-builds.

Also I propose to remove garbage like this: // @description [local-2019-05-10-082357] ...