Simon Josefsson wrote: > I had the same thoughts as you on the '*-dirty' keyword.
Thanks for mentioning it. > However there is a subtlety: modifying a git-owned files lead to version > changes, which after "make dist" in most projects leads to many files > being different compared to upstream version (because of embedded > project version numbers in many generated files). This makes it > _harder_ to compare what changes someone did compared to upstream. Well, it should be well-known that when comparing tarball contents, one needs to exclude built files. I routinely pass 'diff' options such as --exclude=aclocal.m4 --exclude=configure --exclude=config.h.in \ --exclude='*.info*' --exclude='*.html' --exclude='*.1' and so on. > Generally, I have not experienced a scenario where the '-dirty' or now > '-modified' version suffix actually helps with anything It helps when a user reports a problem, attaching for example a --help output. If that output contains a version number ending in '-modified', it helps the maintainer formulate the hypothesis that the problem is caused by the submitter's own modifications. Bruno
