Re: [PATCH] Support building development version without git

[Dima K. <gn...@di...>]

Henri Menke <hen...@gm...> writes:

> If I go to the SourceForge project page [1] and just hit the `Download
> Snapshot' button in the upper right corner, I get a zip file with all
> the source but no .git folder and also no timestamp.h. I suspect there
> is no or at least no easy way to make SourceForge preprocess the
> source when generating a snapshot.
>
> Within the Makefile determining the latest change would be tricky. The
> only way I can think of right now would be to run stat on all the
> files in the source tree and pick the newest one, but that is slow and
> ugly. Maybe instead of using the current date if git is unavailable
> just do echo '0000-00-00'. It should be pretty obvious that this is
> not the true `Last modified' then.

Oh. Wow. OK. My feeling is that people should be either

- using release tarballs
- using git

It's unfortunate that sourceforge makes another option available without
asking, but I don't think it's worth the effort to support it, and a
dummy string is just fine. Is a date string of "DATE UNKNOWN; PLEASE USE
A RELEASE TARBALL OR A GIT CHECKOUT" valid for the purposes of
timestamp.h? Ethan: do you want to support this use case in a better
way?