Magnus Hagander <mag...@hagander.net> writes: > On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 1:40 PM Josef Šimánek <josef.sima...@gmail.com> wrote: >> The only problem I do see is adding "git" as a new dependency. That >> can potentially cause troubles.
> But only for *creating* the tarballs, and not for using them. I'm not > sure what the usecase would be to create a tarball from an environment > that doesn't have git? I agree, this objection seems silly. If we ever move off of git, the process could be adapted at that time. However, there *is* a reasonable question whether this ought to be handled by "make dist" versus the tarball-wrapping script. >> For the file name, I have seen GIT_VERSION or REVISION file names used >> before in another projects. Using ".gitrevision" doesn't make sense to >> me since it will be hidden on Unix by default and I'm not sure that is >> intended. > It was definitely intended, as I'd assume it's normally a file that > most people don't care about, but more something that scripts that > verify things would. But I'm more than happy to change it to a > different name if that's preferred. I looked around a bit and couldn't > find any general consensus for a name for such a file, but I may not > have looked carefully enough. We already have that convention in place: $ ls -a ./ .gitignore README.git contrib/ ../ COPYRIGHT aclocal.m4 doc/ .dir-locals.el GNUmakefile config/ src/ .editorconfig GNUmakefile.in config.log tmp_install/ .git/ HISTORY config.status* .git-blame-ignore-revs Makefile configure* .gitattributes README configure.ac So ".gitrevision" or the like seems fine to me. My thoughts about the proposed patch are (1) you'd better have a .gitignore entry too, and (2) what is the mechanism that removes this file? It seems weird to have a make rule that makes a generated file but none to remove it. Perhaps maintainer-clean should remove it? Both of those issues vanish if this is delegated to the tarball making script; as does the need to cope with a starting point that isn't a specific commit. So on the whole I'm leaning to the idea that it would be better done over there. regards, tom lane