ident strings in pkg-plist

[John Hein]

Doug Barton wrote at 15:58 -0700 on Oct  3, 2010:
 > Changing the list to have a real discussion about this.
 > 
 > On 10/3/2010 3:49 PM, John Hein wrote:
 > > I'll mention that
 > > it has come in handy for me in the past.  I put it into the category
 > > of ident strings in binaries.  It has a similar utility.
 > >
 > > Because I find it useful in maintaining and using a port/package,
 > > I've been one that has added it to pkg-plist in the past.
 > 
 > I'm curious about what your use case for the information is. You can 
 > always know if you have the latest version of the plist via cvs, 
 > c[v]sup, portsnap, etc. Other than knowing that you have the latest 
 > version, what utility does the $Id string in the file itself have?

Mostly convenience (one less level of indirection).

For identifying sub-changes between PORTVERSION/PORTREVISION bumps.

For keeping track of heritage when using a local mirror of
FreeBSD ports, but slightly divergent, for local products.  Mainstream
FreeBSD users don't care about this one, but people who use FreeBSD
and add value might.  For instance, PC-BSD might fall into this
category (not trying to put words in their mouth - just guessing).
$work users might.  Just one specific use case here - we have to
maintain some older 4.x based products and have to have our own branch
of the ports tree.

For aberrant maintenance issues where I have had local screwups.
These, of course, are _extremely_ rare personally ;)  Anyway this
is quite a weak entry on the use case list.

Just like for ident strings in binaries where you can generally get
close enough by knowing uname, you can (as you mention) generally get
close enough to the plist source version from
PORTVERSION/PORTREVISION and cvs, et. al.

Removal doesn't bother me that much, but I found it useful on occasion
over the years.