Alternatives

Before diving in and spitting out this package I looked at the alternatives below. If I have missed something please drop me a mail.

shtool

shtool provides a great version management applet, one which I used for many years in various projects1. Unfortunately, the output formats are hard-coded in the script making it extremely difficult to use in the projects I work on.

A few ideas have been borrowed from shtool, and versionah should be seen as a homage to the version applet from shtool.

If you don’t need the template support of versionah and find the other functionality shtool provides useful, then I’d strongly recommend using shtool. There is little point depending on two external projects when one can suffice.

Since version 0.8.0 of versionah it has been possible to parse shtool generated files2. You can also write shtool-compatible files with versionah v0.14.0 and later3, see the versionah bump --shtool documentation.

Footnotes

1

According to the shtool ChangeLog I used it at least as far back as 2004 when I contributed M4 support, and I didn’t spike versionah until 2011.

2

0.8.0 was the release I cut to as I started to migrate existing projects that used shtool.

3

0.14.0 was the release I cut to support a project that didn’t want to migrate to versionah, where I had already become accustomed to versionah’s interface in the intervening three months.