Re: FYI: new inter-release version strings, e.g., 6.9-219-g58ddd,

[Jim Meyering]

"Dmitry V. Levin" <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 30, 2007 at 05:50:31PM +0200, Jim Meyering wrote:
>> For example, now when I run "make dist", rather than getting the always
>> identically-named coreutils-6.9+.tar.gz, I get tarballs with more
>> meaningful names:
>>
>>     coreutils-6.9.220.gdd469.tar.gz
>>     coreutils-6.9.223.g624d1.tar.gz
>>
>> Similarly, --version output reflects the snapshot:
>>
>>     $ src/cat --version| head -1
>>     cat (GNU coreutils) 6.9.223.g624d1
>
> Since "g" is common prefix produced by git describe, maybe it could be
> omitted?  Also, maybe 4 hexdigits is enough to distinguish snapshots?
> E.g. 6.9.223.624d instead of 6.9.223.g624d1.

Removing the "g" sounds good -- one byte shorter.
Though it seems silly to have to manually truncate to length 4 the
string I already requested be truncated to 4 with
"git-describe --abbrev=4 HEAD".  I wondered if that was somehow
deliberate, or a bug but haven't investigated.