Evening all! The intent of my r32167 commit is to start the necessary work to finally use real version numbers within MacPorts, rather than floating point values that users have to interpret. The MacPorts version is now saved in the "$macports::autoconf::macports_version" variable at source configuration time and used in the "macports::selfupdate" and "macports::version" procs (r32169 and r32170, respectively). If my count is correct, these are the only two places where we read the $ {prefix}/etc/macports/mp_version file, so with them having been "fixed" I'd like to look into removing the installation of said file (it cannot disappear from our sources though, as autoconf uses it to record the version in the macports1.0 namespace and selfupdate to determine if the downloaded sources are newer than the installed base); please alter me if I'm missing something that might break if I now remove the Makefile rule to install the mp_version file. Following that, I'd like to work over the selfupdate proc to use rpm- vercomp, rather than plain arithmetical comparison, to compare the installed MacPorts version number against the downloaded one, which would ultimately allow us to use real version numbers in the mp_version file directly. Chris, IIRC, you and I were once discussing this on IRC and you raised some concerns (dealing with older installations, IIRC); mind refreshing my mind? The one thing I do know I'm gonna have to think about is keeping backwards compatibility. Anything else? Kevin, you and I also spoke about using real version numbers within MacPorts at one time. Mind chiming in with whatever comment you may have on the subject? Lastly, and to anyone reading who might know some autoconf (Landon ;-). From base/configure.ac (after r32167): AC_INIT([MacPorts], [esyscmd(cat config/mp_version | tr -d '\n')], [macports-dev@lists.macosforge.org ], [macports]) (...) MP_VERSION=$(cat config/mp_version | tr -d '\n') (...) AC_SUBST(MP_VERSION) Any idea how I can avoid that duplicate code between the AC_INIT macro and the MP_VERSION declaration? I would love to be able to declare it above AC_INIT and then use it *in* AC_INIT, maybe as such: MP_VERSION=$(cat config/mp_version | tr -d '\n') AC_INIT([MacPorts], [$MP_VERSION], [macports- dev@lists.macosforge.org], [macports]) But that issues a "configure.ac:7: warning: AC_INIT: not a literal: $MP_VERSION" warning and the value of $MP_VERSION is not replaced in. Using [echo $MP_VERSION] generates a similar warning ("configure.ac:8: warning: AC_INIT: not a literal: echo $MP_VERSION") and plain [MP_VERSION] does not complain but simply outputs the "MP_VESION" string instead of its value. So, any pointers? (yes, I'm a total autoconf n00b!) Thanks for our feedback and help! Regards,... -jmpp