Hi, git-version-gen is a very serious nuisance. It efficiently prevents any kind of reliable testing. It creates totally ridiculous version strings like "1.22.3.rc1.40-1327" which then get scattered all over the place, up to and including absurd directory names like
.../share/groff/1.22.3.rc1.40-1327/font/... but that crap really invades *many* places. That way, it is basically impossible to do any serious testing not only because such nonsense causes any packaging system to blow up, but also because all the testing gets completely invalidated once we go back to a sane version name like 1.22.4. Because who knows whether files are still in the right places, modules can still communicate properly, and modules can still handle the radically changing version string? And no, invalidating all previous testing is not what you want to do as shortly as possible before release. Can't we just get rid of that bloat, statically set the version string to 1.22.4 right now, and have the benefit of being able to start with real testing? Even if a number of commits may still go in, the risk that they break something - almost certainly locally - is much smaller than the risk that the complicated version-gen machinery, which has tentacles almost everywhere, causes or hides fundamental issues, which will then fully impact the final release, and that only. Yours, Ingo
