[crossfire] SVN revions in version

[Mark Wedel]

Brendan Lally wrote:

> I'm not sure it is such a great idea to send the revision number to
> the metaserver, certainly not if the metaserver is going to push that
> information out to clients, in that case, someone who wished to be
> annoying could look for servers with revisions predating certain bug
> fixes or balance tweaks and abuse or exploit them.

  OTOH, this really isn't much different than right now.  Server xyz is running 
1.9.0, which doesn't have some bug fix in 1.9.1, etc.

  At some level, it becomes security through obscurity.  And if we believe that 
2.0 will take quite a while to finally get out and release, and that some 
servers may start running 2.0 for testing purposes, they may very well want to 
advertise their version. Of course, that is all up to the server - as far as the 
metaserver protocol is concerned, it is just a text string, so doesn't care what 
is in it (I could modify a server right now to claim it is version 2.5 for example).

> 
> If you are talking about sending the revision as a seperate field to
> the metaserver, that isn't for propagation to clients. then that is a
> different issue altogether, and could provide useful information about
> things like how quickly updates are made available in practice.

  Current metaserver protocol doesn't really support more fields.  It wouldn't 
be hard to add.  There was some discussion in the past about a new metaserver 
layout - that is a different discussion, but could be worth revisiting.

> 
> Likewise, although the clients need only open a connection to the
> metaserver to recieve the server list, having the official clients
> send their revision numbers by default would give some indication as
> to which versions of the clients are in use. (assuming the metaserver
> were suitably modified to read that information from the socket).

  See note above.