Proposal: Provide support for Release information in the API

[gaiaclary]

I propose to add a headerfile to the installed API include files that contains preprocessor directives for the used library version, something similar to:

include/opencollada_version.h:

#ifndef OPENCOLLADA_VERSION
#define OPENCOLLADA_VERSION 1.6.68
#define OPENCOLLADA_VERSION_NUMBER 106068 // #.##.###
#define OPENCOLLADA_BUILDTYPE "CUSTOM" // or "RELEASE" when building from the release sources
#endif

• This allows us to take care of library incompatibilities when we need to support multiple incompatible API versions of the library (1.6.63 vs. 1.6.68 for example). Note that due to cross platform builds it is not guaranteed that a specific version of the library is available in the blender build environment, so we need a reliable method to handle this in the source code.
• Furthermore we can do easy library version comparison like #if OPENCOLLADA_VERSION < 106068 ...
• Furthermore you can tag the source as RELEASE or CUSTOM to be sure only the official released sources are marked as "RELEASE" while all other versions including the repository versions are marked as "CUSTOM"

[RemiArnaud]

COLLADABU/VersionInfo.h already contains the version number for there released packages.

const String CURRENT_REVISION = "1.6.68";

you can get the precompiled, or all the source of released versions on the 'release' tab

[gaiaclary]

Hi, Remi;

1. While this header file exists in the released Opencollada sources, it does not get installed into the API-include directory. So when we finally build Blender from the installed openCollada library, then we can not figure out the Collada library version just from the API includes. There is no information in the API headers that tells us in any way what version of the library this is.

2. Even if the header file would actually be installed, it still would be useless because it only contains a C variable, while we need to have a c-preprocessor definition, so that we can add #if ... #endif brackets into the source code to support different collada library API versions.

3. Also the release number "1.6.68" is not easy to handle when it comes to greater/smaller comparison, that is why i proposed the releasenumber 106068 (##.##.###) in addition to the release version string, again as a preprocessor define.

[RemiArnaud]

I understand. Thanks!

[gaiaclary]

and... no action ? :(