Re: [PATCH] Support building development version without git

[Henri M. <hen...@gm...>]

On 01/07/20, 03:30, Dima Kogan wrote:
> 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?

The original motivation for this change was that I wanted to build the
development version on NixOS.  In the Nix packaging system you can build
stuff directly from a git checkout, but because the system emphasizes
reproducible builds, the build cannot depend on the contents of the .git
directory because these are actually non-deterministic (due to git gc),
so two checkouts of the same commit may actually have a different .git
directory.  This will lead to spurious build failures because the output
hashes differ.

    https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/8567
    https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/20521

I thought it would be a good idea to upstream the support for this but
if this is too much of a pain here, I can also patch it locally.

Kind regards,
Henri

> 
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