[groff] I hate git-version-gen

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi,

git-version-gen is a very serious nuisance.  It efficiently prevents
any kind of reliable testing.  It creates totally ridiculous version
strings like "1.22.3.rc1.40-1327" which then get scattered all over
the place, up to and including absurd directory names like

  .../share/groff/1.22.3.rc1.40-1327/font/...

but that crap really invades *many* places.  That way, it is basically
impossible to do any serious testing not only because such nonsense
causes any packaging system to blow up, but also because all the
testing gets completely invalidated once we go back to a sane version
name like 1.22.4.  Because who knows whether files are still in the
right places, modules can still communicate properly, and modules
can still handle the radically changing version string?  And no,
invalidating all previous testing is not what you want to do as
shortly as possible before release.

Can't we just get rid of that bloat, statically set the version string
to 1.22.4 right now, and have the benefit of being able to start with
real testing?  Even if a number of commits may still go in, the risk
that they break something - almost certainly locally - is much smaller
than the risk that the complicated version-gen machinery, which has
tentacles almost everywhere, causes or hides fundamental issues,
which will then fully impact the final release, and that only.

Yours,
  Ingo