Comments wanted on an idea of changing the binutils version handling

[Christian Jönsson <c dot christian dot joensson at telia dot com>]

I have suggested a new version handling in the binutils sources, bith
for the upcoming 2.12 release, now in prerelease cvs, as well as for
the main cvs branch. I'd like your comments on it since the 2.12
branch maintainer brought to my mind that gcc might rely on specific
version handling.

Here's my suggestion, you might recognise it...

For the main branch, every utility responds to --version like this

objdump (GNU binutils) 2.12.90 20020307 (experimental)
Copyright 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software; you may redistribute it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License.  This program has absolutely no warranty.

and

as (GNU binutils) 2.12.90 20020307 (experimental)
Copyright 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software; you may redistribute it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License.  This program has absolutely no warranty.
This assembler was configured for a target of `sparc-linux'.

and

ld (GNU binutils) 2.12.90 20020307 (experimental)
Copyright 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software; you may redistribute it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License.  This program has absolutely no warranty.

(actually, I'd like to see version number 2.13 there but that's an
other story)

and for the 2.12 prerelease branch


objdump (GNU binutils) 2.11.93 20020209 (prerelease)
Copyright 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software; you may redistribute it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License.  This program has absolutely no warranty.

and

as (GNU binutils) 2.11.93 20020209 (prerelease)
Copyright 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software; you may redistribute it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License.  This program has absolutely no warranty.
This assembler was configured for a target of `sparc-linux'.

and

ld (GNU binutils) 2.11.93 20020209 (prerelease)
Copyright 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software; you may redistribute it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License.  This program has absolutely no warranty.

and for a released 2.12 I would suggest 


objdump (GNU binutils) 2.12
Copyright 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software; you may redistribute it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License.  This program has absolutely no warranty.

and

as (GNU binutils) 2.12
Copyright 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software; you may redistribute it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License.  This program has absolutely no warranty.
This assembler was configured for a target of `sparc-linux'.

and

ld (GNU binutils) 2.12
Copyright 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program is free software; you may redistribute it under the terms of
the GNU General Public License.  This program has absolutely no warranty.


but I suspect, but don't really know, that there might be a date in
the release version as well.

Any comments in this is greatly appreciated. Especially raising
negative effects of such a change.

I'm not sure that this is a wanted thing to have but I'd like to have
it like this in my ignorance. :-)

TIA,

/ChJ