Including git-describe info as version strings for generic "-v" output

Hi all,

I hope the subject makes sense -- I'll explain what I'm trying to do.

I'm wondering what the best approaches are to being able to include output from git-describe [1] for generic version strings in projects managed by Git? This would have to work from within an autotools-managed project.

At the moment, I've managed to hook the output from git-describe in to a few .m4 files, which works only at ./configure time -- but of course, with this being Git, I'd ideally like the same mechanism to work in a situation where someone does:

$ git pull && make

It's knowing how to plumb this in to the Makefile.am part I'm hazy over.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Harry

[1] I know it's "git describe"; I'm using its hyphenated form for clarity of context.