Re: Package version number, autoconf, automake

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Fri, 12 Apr 2019, Vivien Kraus wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Please excuse me if this is not relevant.  I'm only trying to help.
>
> The version definition can be done in configure.ac, but if you use git, and 
> especially git tags (full tags, i.e. signed:
> this is important), there is a little-known script named git-version-gen that 
> computes the git version from:
> 1. The git tags, commit hash, number of commits since the tags, and whether the 
> code corresponds to a clean commit;
> 2. A ".version" file;
> 3. A ".tarball-version" that is added so that the version can be used even in a 
> distribution.
>
> You can get a copy of the script through gnulib, it is named "git-version-gen".
>
> It contains instructions in the script file for how to add it to the project.  
> So if this is not what you want, maybe
> you could mimic that script to define your package version otherwise.

Recently I encountered strace release 5.0 which uses this script. 
Since I downloaded strace source code via a tarball I was unable to 
modify the autotools portions of this package.  At least, the 
git-version-gen script and others mentioned by configure.ac were not 
included in the tarball so 'autoreconf' completely failed.  This 
hindered my freedom to use the software as I intended and in my 
opinion, failing to deliver all scripts in the tarball is contrary to 
GNU GPL principles.

After this, I noticed that the version number for the strace provided 
by Ubuntu Linux 18.04 is declared as the string "UNDEFINED" (rather 
than a number), which was not helpful for me, and indicates a complete 
failure to communicate the version to me.  Perhaps Ubuntu applied a 
patch to work-around the lack of access to a git repository in their 
build process.

In my opinion, release tarballs should be produced in such a way that 
the recipient is free to readily perform modifications of any 
component in the tarball without requiring access to the version 
control system where the tarball originated from.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
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