`git describe`

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Tuesday November 29 2016 14:59:09 Rainer Müller wrote:

>In the past, we often just checked for new features by testing whether
>the corresponding option or proc exists.
>
>if {[info exists ...]} {

Did I miss something? Checking for procedures is done with {[info procs foo] ne ""} nowadays, no?

> > What would you think of a version number of the form
> > 2.3.99-YYYYMMDD-shorthash, or 2.3.99-unixtime-shorthash?
> Probably should use committer date (%cd) instead of author date (%ad).
> The latter is not always monotonically increasing, for example when pull
> requests were rebased onto master in a different order.

If with shorthash you mean the 7 (or so) first characters from the full hash, then that one isn't monotonically increasing either.

I've tried this kind of approach with Linux packages in my Ubuntu PPAs. Doesn't work; more often than not dch will tell you that the new shorthash isn't newer than the old shorthash.

 If you want to use this kind of scheme linking it to a specific commit without using `git describe` you could do x.y.99-[YY]YYMMDDhhmm[ss] . That's not longer than adding the shorthash, and chances that multiple commits are made in a single second (or even minute) are relatively slim (I hope).

R.