VersionNum documentation

Hiya,

Is there any actual documentation for the VersionNum files and their usage?

I’ve been using these since getting the RISC OS source, and – not having the srccommit tool – wrote my commit tool for CVS long ago. This includes some guides for how to use it and the variants (VersionAsm and VersionBas,ffb in particular), but no specific guidelines.

More recently, I refactored the commit tool to remove source control management and just leave the VersionNum manipulation (separation of concerns, etc). This was released as VManage. But again, I’ve only documented the usage of the tool, not the file or how you use it in real projects.

My personal VTranslate tool, which uses these files for substitution in !Help and Messages files, hasn’t been released yet (and again, only talks about how to use it), and I’ve got a riscos-project source code management tool which also manipulates them (also not released, but I’m working on it). Many of the things that I have released open source use this style of file so that the version number can be controlled in a structured way.

The ROOL RepoTools appears to have the srccommit tool in it, but this mixes source control with the management of the VersionNum file, and in any case, doesn’t have much in the way of explanation.

Is there any proper documentation on the field contents, and guide on using the files?