This is perhaps the more useful end of the mechanism I added in the
previous commit: now, when a developer runs a configure+make build
from a git checkout (rather than from a bob-built source tarball), the
Makefile will automatically run 'git rev-parse HEAD' and embed the
result in the binaries.
So now when I want to deploy my own bleeding-edge code for day-to-day
use on my own machine, I can easily check whether I've done it right
(e.g. did I install to the right prefix?), and also easily check
whether any given PuTTY or pterm has been restarted since I rolled out
a new version.
In order to arrange this (and in particular to force version.o to be
rebuilt when _any_ source file changes), I've had to reintroduce some
of the slightly painful Makefile nastiness that I removed in 4d8782e74
when I retired the 'manifest' system, namely having version.o depend
on a file empty.h, which in turn is trivially rebuilt by a custom make
rule whose dependencies include $(allsources). That's a bit
unfortunate, but I think acceptable: the main horribleness of the
manifest system was not that part, but the actual _manifests_, which
were there to arrange that if you modified the sources in a
distribution tarball the binaries would automatically switch to
reporting themselves as local builds rather than the version baked
into the tarball. I haven't reintroduced that part of the system: if
you check out a given git commit, modify the checked-out sources, and
build the result, the Makefile won't make any inconvenient attempts to
detect that, and the resulting build will still announce itself as the
git commit you started from.
The Windows binaries, and both Windows and Unix source archives,
output from a bob build will now include the full SHA-1 of the source
git commit in their buildinfo (hence in all the About boxes and
command-line version output).
This will be occasionally useful to me at release time (there was that
one embarrassing incident where I managed not to notice that I'd made
a release build from entirely the wrong commit), but mostly, it just
seems like an obviously useful thing to put in a general buildinfo
section now that there is one.
I've shifted away from using the SVN revision number as a monotonic
version identifier (replacing it in the Windows version resource with
a count of days since an arbitrary epoch), and I've removed all uses
of SVN keyword expansion (replacing them with version information
written out by Buildscr).
While I'm at it, I've done a major rewrite of the affected code which
centralises all the computation of the assorted version numbers and
strings into Buildscr, so that they're all more or less alongside each
other rather than scattered across multiple source files.
I've also retired the MD5-based manifest file system. A long time ago,
it seemed like a good idea to arrange that binaries of PuTTY would
automatically cease to identify themselves as a particular upstream
version number if any changes were made to the source code, so that if
someone made a local tweak and distributed the result then I wouldn't
get blamed for the results. Since then I've decided the whole idea is
more trouble than it's worth, so now distribution tarballs will have
version information baked in and people can just cope with that.
[originally from svn r10262]
Simon Tatham