`git describe`

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Tuesday November 29 2016 13:28:27 Clemens Lang wrote:

>In which case you're missing the other reason, that is detecting newer MacPorts
>versions. I have used this in the past to write and commit a Portfile that
>would not work with a released version of MacPorts.

Missing only in the sense that I didn't think it would happen frequently enough to consider it important.

But doing this you are implicitly 
>You shouldn't try to extract information from a x.x.99 version number

because it will always pass the test in your ports, regardless of whether the user actually kept the installation up to date.

> You can just use
>  [vercmp $macports_version 2.3.4] > 0
>to check whether a bugfix you need is available.

Which will always succeed if you're using a MacPorts base built from master, no matter how long that was ago.

I'm going to drop this as it seems one of those things we'll have to agree to disagree upon. Rainer convinced me that master shouldn't use the release versions, but I haven't seen (or overlooked) any convincing argument why a master x.x.99.n versioning scheme would be a bad idea.

R.