[crossfire] Handling of "Created" and "Modified" info in map headers

[Mark Wedel]

Raphaël Quinet wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I noticed a difference between how gridarta updates the map headers
> and how my patched version of gcrossedit handles it:
> 
> - gcrossedit handles the "Created" and "Modified" fields like a
>   ChangeLog, appending a new "Modified" line whenever a change is
>   made and the date or author doesn't match the previous entry.
> 
> - gridarta seems to always replace the first "Modified" line,
>   regardless of what was there before.

  <rest snipped>

  As a probably irrelevant data point, the old crossedit also only did one 
Modified line IIRC, which may be where gridarta got it from.

  As I'm thinking about this more, I'm more tempted that all editors should 
really just do 'Modified: $Id$', and let svn/cvs/whatever deal with that last 
modified date.  This actually works better because any checkin has to have a 
real name/e-mail addressed to it.  Or maybe put in another field like ID: which 
has that info.

  This allows for exact version information with the mapinfo command.  While 
unlikely, one could get situations where the same person makes multiple changes 
to the same map file on the same day, and the Modified entry only has a 
resolution of 1 day (so you couldn't tell from it whether it was the most recent 
or not).  I think it also works better with patches, as it makes it crystal 
clear what version of the map the patch is made against.

  I'm also not sure if the map header should really duplicate material that is 
found in SVN (which the modified field info is).  The created file is different, 
because who created the map vs who checked it in originally can certainly be 
different.  So I'd still be tempted to have only the most recent Modified field, 
or perhaps none at all - none of the other source files do.

  I sort of suspect the reason that the maps do have that modified fields is 
because at some point, they predated version control and at that time, there was 
some desire to track that info.