Add a version command

[johncblandii]

Feature

Add a command to see the version of the CLI.

> variant version
X.Y.Z

[mumoshu]

@johncblandii It's the version number of the Variant itself, not that of your own command, right? If so, it makes sense!

[osterman]

Yep, some way to know what version is installed

[johncblandii]

Yep...exactly. We would do our own version management.

[osterman]

@mumoshu I know you're concerned about polluting the arg space with variant commands and options. Maybe time to consider a "reserved" prefix (e.g. --variant-version, --variant-help, etc)?

[mumoshu]

@osterman Thanks!

But no. In Variant 2, variant run or ./yourshim is used as the entry point for all the user-defined commands and flags.

So the user-defined one would be just variant run version or /yourshim version, where the variant's reserved one would be variant version.

In case you need to include the version number of Varaint in the output of variant run version, it would be better to expose it via a builtin variable like context.variantver.

[osterman]

thanks @mumoshu - makes sense to me now

[Nuru]

In case you need to include the version number of Varaint in the output of variant run version, it would be better to expose it via a builtin variable like context.variantver.

Please expand more on this idea of context.variantver or better yet, fully document context (See #50).

I would like to be able to display both the version of Variant my command is using and the version of my command. One possible solution:

• In package main declare string variables version and variantversion
• At build time, set variantversion to the version of Variant using whatever mechanism you want, so long as variant export preserves the variantversion value
• Add a variant version command that outputs main.variantversion
• Expose in context or via some function, both version and variantversion. If version is unset or empty, replace it with variantversion

This would (a) allow you to have a variant version command as requested, and (b) allow me to set a command version through the linker via

go build -ldflags "-X main.version=${MY_COMMAND_VERSION}"