Dealing with application automated versioning

Hi everyone,

I'm a hobbyist C++ coder mostly on Linux systems. Recently i developed a really small personal application and i wanted to see if i could get some automated version numberings in the app. At this moment i keep editing the VERSION.h file that i have created for that sole purpose but it's not actually good practice as it can happen that i forget to edit that file and all is broken. Does anyone here have any custom/special workflow for achieving this? I wanted to have some versioning in the lines of MajorVersion.MinorVersion.BuildNumber or so. Please share what tools/workflows you use for achieving this.

Thanks to everyone for their time and help in advance. Cheers

most of the time I have seen the version set in a configure.h file that simply #defines it. Its still edited by hand though some where. Normally though that is only done periodicly, not with every change.

A simple perl script will update a file for you, as part of some make rule.

This is easy for the build number, but you need to decide for yourself when to update major.minor.

Compiling in __DATE__ and __TIME__ along with a version control system (say rcs or cvs) allows you to accurately see from the object files what is in the code and when it was built.

thank you for your posts ppl,

in the end i am thinking about writting a small c++ app for doing all the version stuff i want done. After all it's easier to write such a thing myself since i know exactly what i want the app to do and what options i need implemented.

Cheers