Re: commit 9d0f14

[Mojca M. <moj...@gm...>]

On 22 March 2018 at 02:34, Tatsuro MATSUOKA wrote:
>  [9d0f14] (HEAD, master) by Ethan A Merritt Ethan A Merritt
>
> another try at timestamp.h, this time using build date
>
> The Makefile rule for timestamp.h was broken when we switched from
> cvs to git, since it relied on ChangeLog always being current.
> Proposed replacement rules have so far failed to work for out-of-tree
> builds or builds from a snapshot rather than a full git clone.
> This attempt simply uses the current build date, which admittedly may
> not be newer than the last-modified date but at least has the virtue
> of not depending on git.

I just wanted to warn you that you will almost definitely get a
request from Debian (as soon as you release the version that will
behave this way and they try to package it) to stop doing that in the
name of reproducible builds.

    https://reproducible-builds.org

My suggestion would be to:
(a) Check if you are building from git and if so, run "git describe"
to determine the version. That's probably by far the best way to
determine the version.
(b) When not building from git, you would usually build from a
released tarball which should necessarily have the version written
somewhere anyway and then you know which version that is exactly.

Of course there are exceptions, like if someone deletes .git or
fetches the zip from the download link from SF or GitHub or wherever,
but you cannot solve all problems and the build date is totally
useless in itself. I can probably build gnuplot 1.0 today and that
won't tell you anything about the exact version I have in case I
submit a bug report.

Mojca