Hi Ingo, On Thu, Mar 15 2018 at 08:34:00 PM, Ingo Schwarze <schwa...@usta.de> wrote: > 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.
Sorry to hear that you were annoyed by that. I thought that having a unique directory name in .../share/groff/ would not be a problem and could help for example to detect a build regression where a file is no longer installed (if for example you forgot to uninstall and have some files from a previous build that are still there), but I understand that it can make the comparison of 2 builds harder. > 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. While I understand the problem of the install directory in .../share/groff (we could easily change that by extracting the first 3 numbers to build the directory name), what's the problem with having the various programs printing a unique version (for example with 'groff --version')? Does this bring extra testing difficulties? Having a unique version seems better when people report a bug (otherwise they would just say "I'm using 1.22.3" or "I'm using groff from git"). Regards, Bertrand Garrigues
