Re: Can the automatic daily update commits be stopped, take 2

["H.J. Lu" <hjl dot tools at gmail dot com>]

On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 6:01 AM, Joel Brobecker <brobecker@adacore.com> wrote:
>> 1. Someone downloads a tar ball and builds it.   "ld --version" should
>> be able to
>> tell at least the date when the tar ball was made.
>
> A date is what we have at the moment, but is far to imprecise, IMO.

The more precise, the better.

>> 2. Someone checks out a branch,  makes some changes, checks into his/her
>> branch and builds it,  "ld --version" should be able to tell the date
>> when the branch was taken.
>
> When the branch was taken? If it were a short-lived branch, why not,
> but what about a longer-term branch?

You can tell the long-term branch, which the short-lived branch is based on,
and the date from the version string even if the branch is short-lived.

> Here is a counter proposal: Modify the build procedures so as to
> first check whether the sources are part of a git repository.
> If yes, then produce a meaning version info from there. If not,
> then provide a way to provide the meaningful info through another
> method. For instance, the nightly source packaging could drop
> a specific file with the needed information. We could even make
> the build first generate the version info in the file when we
> have a git repo, and then do the build using the version info
> from that file.

The more meaningful source info, the better.


-- 
H.J.