Re: Can the automatic daily update commits be stopped, take 2

[Joel Brobecker <brobecker at adacore dot com>]

> 1. Someone downloads a tar ball and builds it.   "ld --version" should
> be able to
> tell at least the date when the tar ball was made.

A date is what we have at the moment, but is far to imprecise, IMO.

> 2. Someone checks out a branch,  makes some changes, checks into his/her
> branch and builds it,  "ld --version" should be able to tell the date
> when the branch was taken.

When the branch was taken? If it were a short-lived branch, why not,
but what about a longer-term branch?

Here is a counter proposal: Modify the build procedures so as to
first check whether the sources are part of a git repository.
If yes, then produce a meaning version info from there. If not,
then provide a way to provide the meaningful info through another
method. For instance, the nightly source packaging could drop
a specific file with the needed information. We could even make
the build first generate the version info in the file when we
have a git repo, and then do the build using the version info
from that file.

-- 
Joel