Re: meaning of "Automatic date update in version.in" commits

Matthias Klose
2017-09-20T15:40:10Z

On 20.09.2017 17:05, Joel Brobecker wrote:
> [adding the GDB group, as this affects both]
>
>> What is the meaning of "Automatic date update in version.in" commits?
>> I mean commits like f625a739e5.
>>
>> This commits litter commits tree and create problems for
>> deterministic, bit-identical and/or verifiable builds.
>>
>> May be worth to remove this (historical?) artifact?
>
> We've had that discussion several times in the past. I'd be quite
> happy to get rid of that daily commit, and most people here probably
> would be too. The issue is that no one has been able to get us
> to agree on what we should be doing instead, and then implement it.
> Part of the obstacles, I think, is that everyone has their own idea
> of the requirements that should be met. Maybe one solution would be
> to ask the group of Global Maintainers to make a decision (at least
> for GDB) once everyone had a chance to provide their feedback. Once
> we have a clear plan of what should be done, I suspect finding
> a volunteer to implement it wouldn't be too hard. I might even
> take an hour or two in a weekend to look into that...

For binutils the date gets encoded into the libbfd and libopcodes soname, so you
are pretty safe during development. Maybe you could manually bump the version
when it is needed, but I assume that is more difficult than the automated daily
bump.

Matthias