Possible kinder GIT-VERSION-GEN?

I have my home directory under git control, and I have a build directory (not tracked by git) under my home directory into which I untar files and then in which I build things, including git.

When doing this, the version reported always contains the '-dirty' suffix, which I find annoying (and potentially misleading). I traced this to the GIT-VERSION-GEN script, and I "fixed" it by checking if there is a '.git' directory present before invoking git diff-index, something like this:

dirty=$(sh -c 'test -f .git && git diff-index --name-only HEAD' 2>/dev/null) || dirty=
case "$dirty" in
'')
        ;;
*)
        VN="$VN dirty" ;;
esac

If someone of authority here thinks this seems reasonable (or has a better way), I will test this (along with any suggested improvements) with the git repo itself (to ensure it puts '-dirty' when it really should), and submit a patch.

Bill

Bill Lear <rael@zopyra.com> writes:

Let me make sure I understand you by rephrasing. You are extracting git tarball as an untracked subdirectory in an unrelated project, and GIT-VERSION-GEN misbehaves. One such misbehaviour is that it adds -dirty.

And I think you are right. The -dirty suffix should be relative to the output of "git describe". Version string derived from any other codepath should not get the suffix, simply because we do not even know if it is dirty. In fact, we should not even attempt to run that diff-index to figure out if it is dirty.

---

 GIT-VERSION-GEN |   12 +++---------
 1 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)

On Monday, February 4, 2008 at 13:59:25 (-0800) Junio C Hamano writes:

Yes, that is correct.

Ok, I trust you know what you are talking about with git-describe.:-)

Bill