On 28/01/2025 09:14, Bruno Haible via Gnulib discussion list wrote:
Simon Josefsson wrote:
To me, the best solution appears to be to not bother with any *-dirty or
*-modified keywords (since they convey too little information to be
useful), and instead have all tools support the 'version-etc' gnulib
module, and in the Debian (etc) packaging set these parameters
--with-packager=Debian \
--with-packager-version=$(DEB_VERSION) \
--with-packager-bug-reports=https://bugs.debian.org/
which results in --version outputs like this:
jas@kaka:~$ /usr/bin/gsasl --version | head -2
gsasl (GNU SASL) 1.10.0
Packaged by Debian (1.10.0-5)
jas@kaka:~$ /usr/bin/idn2 --version | head -2
idn2 (Libidn2) 2.3.2
Packaged by Debian (2.3.2-2build1)
jas@kaka:~$
I believe this approach achives 1) declare what upstream version the
tool you are running is based on to indicate a possibly patched variant,
and 2) avoid needless version comparison failures due to '9.1' vs
'9.1-dirty' when built from patched sources from a git repository.
I definitely agree that the 'version-etc' module is useful for distros
that like to patch most packages (such as Debian); maybe less so for
distros which mostly avoid patching (such as Guix).
As a step to further its adoption, can someone please document the
modules
version-etc
version-etc-fsf
argp-version-etc
in the Gnulib manual? (Not always me :) Simon? Collin?)
Then, it is interesting to note that
* For coreutils programs, "<prog> --help" does not has a "Report bugs..."
output section, because coreutils does not use the
emit_bug_reporting_address function. (Why?)
We've tailored that output in coreutils for various reasons:
https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/016f8c999
https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/5d4f09d83
https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/8b6d3c570
I'll look into incorporating packager info if defined.
cheers,
Pádraig
