meaning of "Automatic date update in version.in" commits

[Philippe Waroquiers]

On Wed, 2017-09-20 at 22:17 +0200, Matthias Klose wrote:
> On 20.09.2017 22:07, Philippe Waroquiers wrote:
> > On Wed, 2017-09-20 at 21:54 +0200, Matthias Klose wrote:
> > 
> > > > 
> > > > Â Â Â Â ~/tmp/gdb/binutils-gdb (master)>git log -1 --format=%cd --
> > > > date=format:%Y%m%d
> > > > Â Â Â Â 20170920
> > > > 
> > > > Then there is no need for additional commit.
> > > 
> > > no, you can't assume that git is available for builds.
> > 
> > In valgrind, the version.h file is build as part of the dist
> > tarball.
> > And if really someone just takes a copy of the sources before 
> > building and/or making the dist tarball, valgrind --version -v
> > will just tell that the git version and date is unknown.
> 
> but we are talking here about sonames for development snapshots.  A
> soname like
> 2.29.50.unknown doesn't change.

I suppose that a development snapshot tarball will always be done
from a git repository, and so will have the sha1 and date in the
version.

And if really someone makes a snapshot outside of a git repository,
then the resulting snapshot will not be very precisely identified.
Don't use it :).

Philippe