Re: Autoconf, snapshot builds, git-version-gen, and groff's version number

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Branden,

> Here's an example.
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/commit/?id=c893202d20273c037cb4007e70f38bdc17946cb4

And the tar file itself is
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/snapshot/groff-c893202d20273c037cb4007e70f38bdc17946cb4.tar.gz
which unpacks to a directory
groff-c893202d20273c037cb4007e70f38bdc17946cb4 which does not contain
any mention of ‘c893...’.

>   Here is the output of "git submodule" for this groff release.
>
>    c8b8f3bbcde37a53cd226f4c9cebd0dde6aca37f gnulib (v0.1-5208-gc8b8f3bbcd)
>
>   We therefore do the following.
>
>     $ hash=c8b8f3bbcde37a53cd226f4c9cebd0dde6aca37f
>     $ wget -O gnulib.tar.gz https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/\
>   snapshot/gnulib-$hash.tar.gz
>     $ tar xf gnulib.tar.gz
>     $ ./bootstrap --gnulib-srcdir=gnulib-$hash

Given the URL contains the hash and the unpacked tar-file contains the
hash, I'd keep the hash in the name of the tar-file too.  Seeing

    foo-42  foo-42.tar.gz

is better when one's trying to understand what's present in a directory
full of things than

    foo  foo-42.tar.gz

> The other problem lies at the top of "configure.ac".
>
>   AC_INIT([GNU Troff],
>           m4_esyscmd([build-aux/git-version-gen --prefix "" 
> .tarball-version]),
>           http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=groff,
>           [groff])
>
> What "git-version-gen" does is either (A) run "git describe" and
> compute a version triple from that or (B) read the triple from the
> file ".tarball-version" (which should never exist in a Git checkout).

...Or git-version-gen can use the specified fallback.  Perhaps that is
useful?

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.