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Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2012 16:47:16 +0200
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Subject: Extension versions
From: j.boggiano@seld.be (Jordi Boggiano)

Heya,

It appears that many extensions do not expose proper version information.

Here an abstract of the various things I found using the following script:

$ for i in `php -m`; do php --re $i | grep "$i version"; done

curl         <no_version>
date         5.4.0
dom          20031129
mysqlnd      mysqlnd 5.0.10 - 20111026 - $Revision: 323634 $
PDO          1.0.4dev
Reflection   $Revision: 321634 $
xdebug       2.2.0rc1

As you see it goes from no version at all to proper versions, passing by
svn revisions, dates, or a mix of all.

In Composer [1] we try to parse all that using ReflectionExtension, to
allow people to require some specific version of an extension if they
want. Obviously this doesn't work very well when no version or some
random revision number is provided.

Is there any other way I overlooked to get more version info? If not,
can this at least be improved in the future?

[1] http://getcomposer.org/

Cheers

-- 
Jordi Boggiano
@seldaek - http://nelm.io/jordi