Re: [PATCH 2/2] version --build-options: report commit, too, if possible

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 8, 2017, 17:27 UTC
Message-ID: <20171208172733.GC14261@aiede.mtv.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <908989103a06291e38c8551c447bc73eb781fb26.1512752468.git.johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>

Hi,

Johannes Schindelin wrote:

> In particular when local tags are used (or tags that are pushed to some
> fork) to build Git, it is very hard to figure out from which particular
> revision a particular Git executable was built.

Hm, can you say more about how this comes up in practice? I wonder if we should always augment the version string with the commit hash. E.g. I am running

	git version 2.15.1.424.g9478a66081

now, which already includes the commit hash because it disambiguates the .424 thing, but depending on the motivation, maybe we would also want

	git version 2.15.1.0.g9b185bef0c15

for people running v2.15.1 (or at least when such a tag is not a well known, published tag).

> We need to be careful, though, to report when the current commit cannot be
> determined, e.g. when building from a tarball without any associated Git
> repository.

This means that on Debian, it would always print

	built from commit: (unknown)

Maybe I shouldn't care, but I wonder if there's a way to improve on that. E.g. should there be a makefile knob to allow Debian to specify what to put there?

Thanks, Jonathan