[LON-CAPA-dev] Updating LON-CAPA on a development server

[Stuart Raeburn]

A part of the changes made for LON-CAPA 2.10 was the inclusion of  
version checking to determine whether a course featured any specific  
version requirements arising from included response types and/or  
parameter settings.

Roles in courses requiring a specific version (or later) of LON-CAPA  
can not be selected on a server hosting the user's session if that  
server's version is too old.

The question then arises - how best to accommodate development  
servers? - for which traditionally the Version has remained as the  
default, i.e., set to: <!-- VERSION --> which is blank on a web page.

Given that developers need to be able to test future code changes to  
version checking and or dependencies etc., continued use of <!--  
VERSION --> is not a good solution.

Instead development servers will include a version number similar to  
2.11.CVS_HEAD-2011022621 where the first part is the number of the  
next version (in the form N.M) and 2011022621 is the date/time of the  
last update to CVS_HEAD, in the form YYYYMMDDHH.

The N.M and CVS_HEAD in the version number come from the values set in  
Makefile for VERSION and NEXTVERSION respectively.

The procedure for updating a development server used to be:

cd /somewhere/loncapa
cvs update -d -A
cd loncom/build
make build
su
make install

One additional line is now added so it becomes:

cd /somewhere/loncapa
cvs update -d -A
cd loncom/build
make build
make aboutVERSION
su
make install


Stuart Raeburn